April 2 – May 2, 1992
Since the mid-Seventies, almost all of my work has focused on some aspect of
change. What began as a curiosity about certain kinds of changes occurring in the
natural and urban environments eventually evolved into an exploration of how our
perceptions change in relation to the things around us. As new information reaches us,
and as the context in which we receive information changes, we must re-assess our
understanding of the world.
From the beginning, I have juxtaposed photography and written language as a
way of exploring these issues. While both are fundamentally subjective media
that reflect an artist’s or writer’s imagination and decision-making process, we
also have imbued photography and language (partly for good reasons) with the
ability to stand for reality itself. I believe that their dual nature makes them
powertul tools for addressing the way we experience the world. By juxtaposing
photographs and language, in using one to establish and then change the
context in which to view the other, the inherent subjectivity and malleability of
each medium is underscored. This, in turn, directs our attention to just how
protean our interpretations of the world itself can be.
Notes on the Development of My Work
1974-78
In 1974, while at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I began taking
photographs of a construction site near my studio. (At that time, I was painting and
making sculpture. I picked up a camera on a whim.) I was moved, simply, to record in a
systematic way the site’s daily changes. In the process I realized that all sorts of changes,
beyond the building’s progress, were occurring. For example, from day to day the light
would change, or it would have snowed. Intrigued by this, I turned to looking more
seriously at these kinds of changes, and I used photography, almost in a documentary
fashion, to accomplish this.
From the very beginning, my way of photographically investigating change was by
comparing images. Because I was juxtaposing multiple images, I could not help but be
concerned with what lay between the photographs— what lay just beyond their edge or
behind the camera, or in the next “photographic moment.” This seemed just as
important to me as the information contained in the photograph itself, and my work
grew to encompass this fact. Thus, the single photograph has never been of much
importance to me.
1978-82
Gradually, I became dissatisfied with paying attention to merely formal kinds of
changes. I wanted my work to deal with content as well. By then I had several hundred
images, each taken with a certain purpose in mind. I discovered that when separated
from this original purpose, these photographs became completely open to
interpretation. Again, on a whim, I began to write brief descriptions to accompany
certain photos. Or I would reverse the process by going to my journals and notebooks
and selecting brief passages for which I’d then find photos. The resulting photo/text
stories tended to be autobiographical and psychological, satisfying my desire for more
content in my work.
This work led me to see the extent to which photographs are open to interpretation.
Placed in different conceptual contexts, photographs can mean very different things. Just
as the world changes from moment to moment (with our perceptions of it following
suit), so can our reading of a photographic image.
1 9 8 2 – P r e s e n t
The work currently being exhibited reflects the next step in the progression of my
ideas and interests. I have continued to focus on the idea of change, but less on changes
in the external world, or in our interpretations of photographs, than on change that
occurs within us. I c o n t i n u e to juxtapose p h o t o g r a p h s a n d text a n d to rely, as before, or
their subjective qualities; but my purpose, now, is to use those subjective qualities to
point to how protean our