I engage in the body, which I view as a machine, attracted to moments of breakdown. Illness and pain are the raw materials comprising my personal alchemy. A feeling of discovery ensues when the two coalesce into an image. Inert and organic materials originating in my own and foreign bodies are the elements with which I work. Similar to a chemical reaction, they undergo a transformation to come together into a lyrical image that sometimes loses its source entirely a process of abstraction.
Similar to producing a sound which is reflected back as an echo, my work turns to parallel worlds which respond in poetry, painting, and body art. These are the realms which I visit from time to time and from which I always return to photography, as I am deeply rooted in its tradition and history.
Although I am a photographer, I rarely make documentary works. I work mainly with existing photographic materials which become the working tools in my experimental laboratory in which images are constructed and deconstructed. I frequently make use of X-rays, road maps, and photographs from books and printed periodicals. I consider them puzzles or codes I seek to decipher. Paradoxically, the decoding process mostly creates a new secret. Over the past few years, scanning has become my major work mode. While the camera is the natural extension of the eye and body of the subject who gazes, the scanner maintains an objective distance, without a stance or hierarchy, remaining simultaneously unemotional and sensuous.
Throughout my years of making art, I make frequent use of archaic manual processes which have become almost irrelevant. Art enables me to engage in unnecessary actions with their technical clumsiness as I long for materiality in a world in which it is absent. In my new series, I use a simple office stapler and hundreds of staples to create precise and orderly circles. The prosaic, characterless material encounters an abstract, ritual, impractical action. In many senses, the work distills my action mechanisms: identifying existing material whose functionality originates in the non-art world; appropriating, abstracting, and transforming it. The material loses its original function as it creates a singular, unique, and poetic new world.
