Dwelling

Called Dwelling or Field Drawings, this body of work was made from the pages and uncut proof sheets of a mail-order outdoor gear catalog. It was full of amazing hand-drawn illustrations that I would work with later but I was initially only interested in the drawings of camping tents. My strongest impulse was to completely cover over the text and pictures on every page leaving only these illustrations of groups of tents to show through. The first series of drawings was made with obsessive pencil cross-hatching, creating fields of graphite so dense that the cheap catalog paper became stretched and deformed, foil-like. A second series of white-on-white pieces made with correction fluid took a different tack, covering everything as before but responding closely to the shape of the text and illustrations underneath, disguising it but embellishing it, too.

It took some time before I could articulate why I did this. I tend to work that way, following my attention and devising methods and processes for eliminating distraction. Only later do I let words attempt to define what drew me in. The thread connecting Dwelling to the other work I was producing at that time was a desire to depict the distances between people, the silences, the overlapping of the social with an absence of communication. Of course what I can identify is only a reason for making the work and not its meaning. Now, two decades later and at a time of intense national crises including homelessness and forced immigration I hope that readings of this work are more than ever up for grabs.