In The Artists Words

A Day In The Life

(Art as process and the act of making)

On days when I am not working as a writer and teacher, I try to wake up early. I empty my oversized messenger bag of books and papers and the previous day's half-eaten lunch. I place the strap over my left shoulder, with the bag firmly secured to my back. I begin to walk. I walk for as long as it takes to fill the bag with stuff: branches, findings from the local thrift stores, choice items left in boxes on sidewalks and, if I'm lucky, something I've never seen before. Once the bag is filled, I return home, empty the contents from the bag, creating mounds of what some might consider piles of junk. I see them as source materials and the beginnings to my art making process.

I am committed to using these discarded/ recycled materials as an environmentally conscious artist but also as an artist who strives to make art accessible through both its practice and use of materials. Quite frankly, I get a kick out of forcing these disparate objects to come together, compromising and accommodating one another in their process of becoming something new, something beautiful.

I refer to what I do as art making because I do not paint, draw or sculpt in a traditional or learned consideration of artistic craft. My craft is founded in the doing. I glue things together. I make things fit. I dip things in wax. I cut. I build. I weave. I think. I fill things up with paint using ketchup bottles. I stare at things in hopes that these things will talk back to me. This is what I do. It makes me happy. It allows me to lose myself in the process of doing. It makes me sad. It allows me to find myself in the process of seeing.

To me art is not arriving at a product but rather the process of moving through world and responding to the consciousness of the times. 

About the butterflies

I began the practice of cutting butterflies by hand and in free form as a response to the killing of 9,000 butterflies in Damien Hirst’s piece, In and Out Of Love”featured in the Tate retrospect of 2011. It was a gut level, intuitive response to this killing of 9,000 living things in the name of art. I wanted to call him a prick for this atrocious act and as such I cut butterflies from the images of male genitals. I wanted to respond in as direct a commentary as possible, essentially saying, “ What  a dick!” What I did not anticipate happening was discovering the meditative nature of the gesture. I cut butterflies daily out of gay porn for the course of several years. I kept record of the numbers and surpassed Hirst’s death count of 9000 butterflies. Given this mass quantity of cut butterflies, I began to use them in the art. I should state that I do not see this as gay art or political art. This is art and art that does not offend is not worth making. I do not make art to deliberately offend but I do have a perspective, position and lived experience that I am trying to convey in my work. 

About the porn / about this time

What is pornography and what is political? The body is political. When a room full of men make decisions about what a woman can do with her body, this is politics in its most insidious ways. That they can do this and think that it is their right and that it is justified, this is masturbatory and  this is pornographic  It just so happens that I use the white male body in the form of butterfly cut outs to facilitate this thinking or perhaps  more appropriately, this lack of thought. One can say that I am using pornography to make a commentary on what is really pornographic in our society. I would like to think that I am making art and art demands that you take a position, that you assert your thinking, that you agree or take issue. It is art after all. This is life