The Ride Continues-Studio shots and Excerpts

Excerpt from recent paper:
“In my recent works, this conversation between artist and object, object with object, and viewer with both is achieved first by capturing gaze through appropriation of a readymade, causing ambiguity through odd familiarity and identification. The white shirts, symbolic of formality, structure, and class, have an inherent pureness about them that points directly to my past personal identity, as well as to the nature of our past culture.
As objects, these shirts converse with each other and, in some with themselves and, like Shiota’s indexical bed and Lemieux’s postcard and furniture, create the illusion that lives are present even in their absence.
This state of presence in absence combined with the mark making and the places they inhabit, causes activity between form and space which sends the viewer continually traveling and conversing between past and present, present to present, and even past and present with the future.
In Figure 4: Relief, the viewer is kept from entering directly into the scene and only allowed to watch and read the narrative from afar through the placement of the spools of threads and buttons on the floor. The facing of the objects and the thread marks create that tug and pull that Elkins speaks of in his book. The tears and rips speak to the past, the mending the present, and through the gesture of the threaded needle placed in between the two shirts, the conversation is allowed to continue endlessly into the future.
In Figures 5-8 which includes imagery from works: Transference, Stay, Fragmented, and Holding on, these ongoing absorptions, transferences, transformations, comforting, struggling, holdings on to and carrying through conversations happen through ancestry, relationships and also within ourselves. This is what transports the viewer into verse. These shirts with their reference to the continuity and threads of the connections of human existence remind us that we are not alone (thesis topic?), that we come from that which has come before us, and with whom we have been connected, and that we are only as individual (in life as in art) as circumstances and choices will allow."