


Gallery
Schism: The Art of the Fractured Self
Through painting, sculpture and video, Schism: The Art of the Fractured Self depicts and reflects the fracturing and dissociation of identity in the face of trauma and its reconfiguration through the creative process. Through imagery derived from dreams and paralleling themes from mythology, the show presents the transformations of the self in response to adversity and the creation of art as cycles of destruction followed by renewal. Schism is about the construction of beauty and meaning out of the horror of overwhelming life experience. I am fortunate as an artist to have the ability to dream lucidly, or be conscious of the fact that I am dreaming while it is happening. This allows me to actively create while I am dreaming, consciously directing characters and storyline. When I awaken I translate these stories into multimedia artworks. I am often asked how I came to work in so many different materials. I began as a 2-D artist, painting and drawing and writing in a dream journal. Later, I became frustrated as this did not feel like enough to communicate my ideas. The paintings felt like windows that I could see through but not touch what was inside. I decided that I shouldn’t be limited by medium and that I should instead let the visions take me where they will. The paintings started to become more three-dimensional, and I shifted into sculpture and installations and then later into time based works in video. I find this allows me to surpass the limit of the window and truly step through the door into that other place in my head and allow others to see inside, if only in a veiled way.