Marmoreal

Finding fresh ways to depict the movement of time is one of the visual challenges that interests me. As a child, I was raised on tall tales centered around my family's southern gothic roots. The past was always close at hand. The family tree is full of preachers, artists and eccentrics, mill owners, and truck drivers, with a PE teacher and butterfly collector thrown in for seasoning. Our fortunes seemed to rise and fall in unexpected ways. Being immersed in stories about my relatives, most of whom I never met, has given me a great deal of pleasure, largely, because the mundane details of their lives were washed out in the telling. Eventually I came to the realization that I am more interested in how the past looks filtered through my imagination, than I am in recording facts.

The pictures in the Marmoreal series are made by layering images I created from scratch using digital software onto marble statues that I photographed in museums. One welcome side effect of this method is that the colors sometimes fray and break where two shades meet. Occasionally a nose or forehead will protrude through the digital layer almost as if the statues were still three dimensional, and the camera failed to force them onto a two dimensional plane. The lack of machine-like smoothness in the application of pigment parallels the real damage that time and the elements inflict.

Though these images are not directly about my family, the methodology for looking backwards is what interests me. Marmoreal is an example of how personal history, filtered through memory and desire, is both real and imaginary.