influences

before i show you what i have been working on lately, i need to give credit where credit is due. there are three artists that i feel linked to through this work:

i have been obsessed on an off by gordon matta-clark ever since seeing slides of his work in a contemporary art class. he got famous cutting up abandoned houses. sometimes he literally cut them in half, or he cut the corners off or cut sections out to bring into the gallery. it gives me the shudders. cutting an old house seems as delicate and transgressive as cutting a cadaver. he plays with size-- houses are supposed to encompass and shelter a person, but pieces of a wall in a gallery are so personal, you can see every scratch every wrinkle every mark of time and use.

joseph cornell became my hero when i read a book called Dime Store Alchemy by charles simic. joseph cornell has been described as a "fellow traveller" of the surrealist movement. he juxtaposed bizarre objects, usually salvaged from the trash, to create eerie narative scenes usually in decrepit looking boxes. i love this guy.

recently i was in the lacma and i saw a painting that stopped me in my tracks. it was a large canvas with a small delicate pencil sketch of a house directly in the center. surrounding it was a field of industrial gray. it reminded me so much of my first drawer painting of the village. it was by an artist named joe goode. he did a few houses like this and the sense of isolation, desolation and exclusionary domesticity that i see in them resonates with me deeply. now that i have seen his paintings i am consciously working to do something different than what he did, but his houses are beautiful and i agree with them.