This project is a reflection on the "subject" both in the sense of a topic and the particular forms of consciousness associated with a person or social condition. I ask "what is the subject" by devising three works that explore different ways of scattering and gathering materials, methods and collaborators. Currents of contemporary art and discussions among anthropologists and cultural theorists flow into these reflections and makings on subjectivity, relationships, art and the senses in this era of digital promiscuity.
The program includes three projects that get at different aspects of subjectivity and subjectness. I developed "Invitation" and "Self Portrait in Place." in 2020-2021, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, while living in Paris." "One and Many" was enacted at the Museum of Riverside, California in March 2022.
Scroll down to read summaries of each project with links to further information.
I use this site as a space to exhibit, publish, reflect on and perform the art/experiments as they evolve. I work with a ready-made digital platform, much as I might paint on a pre-stretched canvas. Other iterations of the individual works and the project as a whole will take shape in galleries or in print media as the project continues. Reflecting on how "the subject" changes as it shifts among media and genres of publication and diverse audiences becomes part of the experiment.
This project explores communication, touch and truth. The piece is composed of 33 pieces that I made over several months, then mailed to people around the world. These individual pieces of the single artwork will never meet except on this site, where I diversely configure and refelct on the subject of the art by way of the photographs and texts recipients send to me.
The process of making, sending, receiving the photographs and assembling them has sparked reflections on conceptions of the "full picture, " that I did not imagine when I first concieved "Invitation." I probe the generative capacities of the project design and the questions of subjectivity, be it individual, collective or dispersed.
Self-Portrait
This project began with an outdoor portrait/parcours
scattered around the Montmartre quarter of Paris.
(Self-Portrait in Montmartre)
From December 10- January 30,
a second rendition of the Self-Portrait was exhibited at
the Gallery of the American University of Paris
(Self Portrait in Place)
Self Portrait in Montmartre
May 16, 2021
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This project makes the Montmartre quarter of Paris a canvas and a frame for an interactive, dynamic self-portrait/landscape. The work was scattered within a kilometer of the apartment where I lived from June 2020 to June 2021 during the COVID pandemic, while undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
The portrait as parcours twas exhibited on May 16, 2021 . Visitors received a map with twelve sites they could chose to visit in any order. Viewable, palpable, on-site materials were enlivened by slides shows, videos and audio recordings accessible on a cell phone. Participants were invited to make their own recordings and notes about the bits and pieces that made up the scattered portrait.
This self portrait literally mingled its subject (me) with the landscape. frame/calendar of the quarter. Working within the confines of a year, a place and my biography the artwork led me to contemplating questions of time and visibility, surveillance, and the body-self in motion.
Habituellement, les autoportraits sont réalisés seuls, en studio, puis accrochés pour être visionnés dans une exposition ou un musée. J'adopte une approche différente pour ce portrait dans le cadre de mon programme de travail en cours sur les « sujets éparpillés ».
Pour mon portrait, j’inclus l'environnement et le spectateur dans le cadre du processus de composition, qui n'est jamais tout à fait complet, jamais entièrement présent, comme n'importe quel sujet dans une œuvre d'art, ou dans la vie.
Ce travail intègre naturellement les conditions particulières de mouvement restreint et de distanciation sociale au cours des derniers mois pour tout le monde. Il comprend aussi ma découverte et traitement pour un cancer du sein qui a chevauché les mois de pandémie et qui a transformé une visite à Paris en une migration de retour provisoire.
Self Portrait in Place
9 December 2021/ 30 January 2022
American University of Paris
The second exhibition of the self-portrait brought what was outdoors inside. In the gallery,the body of the viewer was no longer immersed in the city, but instead, in large paintings that appeared tiny in the first versions when they were viewed on phone screens.Brushstrokes, words and scratches on canvas become palpable, while the city became image. The visitor no longer heard their own heart neat quicken as they climbed the Montmartre hill. Inside, the voices in the digital recordings became more distinct.
The gallery of the university stretched from the building entrance and cafe through the library and into an atrium with a view on the Seine. Although the rush of students and faculty between classes might intimate the street, the space included resting places with chairs and coffee tables. In the warm gallery, people could pause in front of a work or sit together to discuss it. They ccould linger as they associated what they saw first-hand with digital elements. They could make a digital visit of the original self-portrait and compare it to this second version.
Exhibition curated by Blanca Casas Brullet
With special thanks to Antonella Casellato, Waddick Doyle, Caroline Pierce and Jonathan Shimony.
Time Lapse: LA Arts Documentary
The final project in this series explores collective and composite subjects. At a time when people are beginning to meet in public places again, "One and Many" presented a large public artwork to instigates an active, collective reflection on the body and the body politic, self and community and the the part to the whole.
On March 3, 2022 I stretched a 25 foot long painting of a poppy field across the front of the Riverside Museum. The work was be composed of over 100 individual artworks. Viewers who attended the "opening" of the one-work exhibition during the city's monthly art walk were invited to select one of these individual works to bring home with them. In return, they filled in the empty space on the canvas revealed by removing their artwork.
Why poppies? Poppies are among the first flowers to burst into bloom in spring. In California there are entire parks dedicated to the huge hillside tapestries they weave with their petals.
In this work, I celebrate this beautiful if fleeting bloom, along with other properties and symbolic meanings of the fragile flower. Poppies have been associated with spring fields and life since antiquity, so too their narcotic properties. They symbolize fertility and life, dream states and death. Since WWI red poppies have been worn in English speaking countries to honor veterans. Trade in the products of the poppy were at the center of the colonial Opium wars in China. Today, in Afghanistan, and around the world, farmers uproot food crops to plant opium poppies to survive. ( for more click here)
