Copyright 2007-2022

Postulates / With Carl Toth and Under the spell of Elaine Scarry


The photograph signs reality. What is signified is fiction. My work deploys the photograph in this sense; not as a document of our physical realm, but as cumulative evidence of its own photo-sentient reality.

Corporeality is found in the seams. Its creation is a repair. A repair that’s not intended to be seamless, it announces itself astride the old. The repair is evolution, the ever changing real. Creation is a scar.

The depicted wound does not heal.

The photograph denies change, and presents evidence of a static reality within its own borders. If the photograph does capture a bit of death on the corporal side, it appears in the image as perfectly preserved life. It lives, fastened along the continuum of the everlasting. The photo sentient reality eludes decay, change, and death. Understandably, it is where we find our ideals.

Plywood is the meaning of (a) tree.

Through plywood, the hidden truth of trees is revealed in 4 x 8 foot sheets. Cut down and skinned, the tree becomes all phantom limb phantom meaning fallen, the tree is sliced and reassembled, glued up in layers to create a uniform surface, a face, four by eight. Is this the rectangle where trees see their meaning of life? Their god contained? Do stumps feel the itch of something missing?

There’s a corpse on your dollar bill.

A corpse is the image of a human being. It is merely appearance. It holds no soul, no person, no world, it does not feel and it does not change. The corpse is a container that can be seen. We imbue it with fictive contents that become meaning with an exchange value, a corpse currency. This meaning is laid on the skin and spent. What is bought is the verification of surface, a corpse reality that denies the corporeal.

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Research Statement