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The storm inrresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before
him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
'Theses on the Philosophy of History', Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
This work grew out of the zeitgeist of our time, a period of rapid change without reflection on what these changes may mean. Living within Benjamin's 'storm' has caused me to examine the modernist myth of a utopia created through infinite 'development' and 'progress'. In All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman writes that to be a modernist is to make onself somehow at home in this 'storm'. Feeling 'at home' connotes both comfort and acceptance. Increasingly, I am not 'at home' with this idea of 'progress' which denies awareness of both past and future consequences and points to a time when humanity and nature are being colonized and stand to be superseded by technology. Neither am I 'at home' as a late twentieth century Luddite, content to find consolation in the pastoral or a Rousseauian return to nature.
My painting installation titled 'Oliver's Twist' comprises a large central image of a storm, and four side panels which function as fragments. The installation is meant to encompass the audience in a behavioral sense, so that one feels 'in' the work, much as one feels in the storm. The image of body fragments on the wall, act as text- coded gesture which mirror the viewer's own body.
The disappearance of the handmade in conjunction with the mechanization of the body, signals the intervention of technology-as-nature. My method of making is of equal importance to what I represent. In these works acrylic paint, wax and oil-stick are applied in smooth layers. The images are revealed by scribing through darker layers into the light. I employ painting as a contemporary representational technology, capable of responding to the human condition in postmodernity. To paint is a continuous affirmation of the tactile evidence of human nature, found in traces of the work of my hand.
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