Desolation's Comfort Artist's Statement
Desolation’s Comfort is my response to the lonely landscape. Whether one defines landscape literally as land, sea, and sky or more expansively as both inner and outer worlds matters not. It is a vacuum that, for some reason, I need to fill. When I started this process several years ago, I felt that it was the lost characters from old photographs that needed grounding and placement in my world’s landscapes. Now I realize that, conversely, it is I who needed them.
The characters that populate my landscapes are enigmas. Mostly, they come to us from times past, their earthly presence now only ghostly images on forgotten and tattered photographs. Many I knew personally as a small boy, some were known only from oral histories told to me by elders. Others remain a complete and utter mystery. No matter. It turns out that I knew very little about any of them, especially my paternal grandfather, who can be found in so many of the photomontages exhibited here. He, perhaps, is the greatest mystery of all. During this project, I seemed to be channeling him—he and I were somehow developing a story well beyond my understanding. You’ll find him here, peering back out at us, oddly at home in his grandson’s opus.
Just as the universe constantly recombines in myriad ways, these compositions have come together in this place and time. They tell a story that is probably unique to each beholder. All of these humans, totem animals, and desolate lands have come to me separately at some time, in some way. They have all been personal discoveries. All have been gifts. Now they have been recombined here before you. If there is something unsettling to be found, it might be that recontextualization has a way of surprising us with its naked truth.
I now present them to you so that you might find something of yourself in these images. Your interpretation and response is a vital part of the swirling magic of life and death and rebirth again. Your imagination is just what I need to make this project complete.
