WHROMP!  satirically combines images from popular 1950s sources: a primer for beginning readers, and a Korean war comic book. Images of innocents at play are collaged on translucent pages through which burned holes reveal soldiers in dramatic struggles. 

 

Record-Keeping Essentials is an altered ledger book created in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, using drawings, watercolor and collage from contemporary news stories. Since the contents of many people’s lives were swept away in this catastrophe, the title and the ledger’s use for keeping records suggest the piece is an elegy.

 

The Golden Bough is a copy of that book rendered as a tree by cutting and immersing it in tea and watercolor. Its survey of indigenous peoples’ rituals, designed to control nature and society, has long fascinated me.

 

How To Improve Your Photographs is a 1940s Kodak instruction booklet altered by drawings, cutting, collaging, and partial masking of text and image with acrylic paint. Stock photos become surreal and creative through these processes.

 

Spy Manual was created by cutting a man’s shoe in half laterally and inserting pages of transferred images of anonymous men in suits. The shoe acts as a book cover. On the reverse sides of the “cover”, stenciled text evokes spy code and commentary on the emotional perils of a career in spying.

 

My father was a diplomat, and for years many people asked me if he was actually a spy.