My current ongoing project is titled “Local Coverage You Can Count On”.
The work spans roughly a year of development and research that investigates the visual language of the sky. While my practice has always focused on the clouds, this recent work pulls from an archive of both found and personal images. The found images are depictions of phenomena seen in the sky, suspicious angel shaped clouds warranting local news coverage, a headline reads “a sign from above?”.
While creating digital collages of these "sightings" over my own photographs, I began to lose track of which photographs were my own. This delusion fueled the work, representations akin to a Fata Morgana, became fertile ground for a dialog between skepticism and belief. With nature as the vessel for miracle, these collages engage with a duality of spirit. They ask the question of the viewer, are these self fulfilling prophecies of the beholder? Or digitally manipulated tellings of the human’s desire to make meaning out of existence? Blurring the line between fact and fiction has always been the crux of belief systems and in this work I come face to face with my own desire to find meaning in the sky.
Throughout the work the viewer will notice figures reappearing, sometimes clearly, other times manipulated past a point of recognition. Here, I have incorporated the myth of Icarus into my visual language, depicting Daedalus and Icarus on their final flight. Metal, wax, fabric and graphite pencil blend together in each composition, moving the work through its own narrative journey of becoming, existing, and eventually, obsolescence. Approaching each piece through the lens of these materials has allowed for the work to remain in a play state. Starting first with the physicality of making, then braiding the compositions together to form a series. This project is ongoing, and I plan to elevate the forms and lines with larger scale sculptural components, pushing the silhouette of these bodies flying and falling through the sky.
These two concepts meet in a zealous marriage of humanity, where we find ourselves at the mercy of nature. This project is bound by the desire to make sense, to conquer and to relinquish to the things we deem “bigger than us”. At times that is simply the clouds, and others it is what the clouds hold.