Mining Presentness

Artist Statement

In the essay “Approaches to What?”, French writer Georges Perec calls on readers to “question [their] bricks, concrete, glass, [their] table manners … To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish ...”

This sort of exercise in reflexiveness is fundamental to presentness, and through such meditations, it becomes easier to resist the ideologies that attempt to define our existence. To be present is to exist, but presentness is transcendence: moments are suspended in time; meanings shift; and the ordinary becomes the sublime. This shift in consciousness occurs through close observation - existing in the moments when it seems as if nothing is happening.

In my own life, a state of presentness materializes just below the surface of the chaos and overwhelm, found in the unremarkable ordinary events of daily life: in the screeching brakes of the school bus; in the puffs of dust gliding across the floor; and in the vibration of a slamming door. I take note of these prosaic moments and build an archive of ephemera. The sounds, images, and objects that once seemed arbitrary now have the potential to become source material in my art practice. Rearranged and layered, these fragments disrupt the inertia and project the liminality of being.