IMMORTAL ARTIFACTS SHOW Decmber 2009 Corey Helford Gallery Culver City |
| I began work on this show with the vague intention of dealing with the relationship between the consumption and production of art and culture. I have a great love for classical art and music from the Renaissance to Art Deco, those pieces with enduring resonance. But like many artists, I also collect all kinds of old objects. To these artifacts I am drawn because, like a death mask, they are the imprints of things that are gone. Many people say that my characters resemble dolls. For me dolls represent immortal youth. But they are also the remains of something that has passed, and when they are antiques, of someone who has died. The first antique doll I bought was one produced by the German-Jewish firm Kammer & Reinhardt at the beginning of the twentieth century. While this delicate bisque doll survived two world wars, both the manufacturer and the original owner are gone forever. So the very immortality of any artifact is always reminiscent of the death of something intimately connected to it. As I began making sketches for this exhibition I realized that precisely because art is immortal it is also morbid. Art survives—it carries within traces of its dead producer. So it represents not only the eternal, but also the ephemeral. Art becomes artifact. Being the crumby narcissist that I am, I have noticed that I produce art in order to leave my own artifacts—in other words, my own death mask. And so the whole process of painting becomes rather macabre, like writing your own requiem. But the process is also vital because it always involves taking in cultural artifacts and giving them new life. The paintings in this exhibition try to hint at the obscure process by which culture flows in and out of individuals. In several paintings I use music to represent this flow. In others I try to represent the pain and sacrifice the process often involves; in still others the way in which artifacts quickly move beyond their creator’s grasp. As with the two figures holding a ribbon between them, the surgical forceps, pocket watch, teapot and teacup form an exchange of artifacts, but its direction and significance remains mysterious. |