My current solo exhibit, "Monuments" is featured at The Elephant Room Gallery in Chicago www.elephantroomgallery.com. It will be exhibiting until August 28th.  There will be a closing reception on August 27th from 7-9. 

The exhibition features an entirely new series of work which focuses on the factories which have been shut down around my home.

       Artist Statement for Monuments

Ecclesiastes says, “What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.” This exhibit features monuments—tombstones, to labors which have come and gone—yet remain. Factories drove the economy of most of the towns where I grew up. They provided jobs and food for thousands of families. Now they merely sit under the sun, returning to the earth. The activity has ceased and they simply are. These structures which represented function and mass production now sit purposeless.

I’ve explored three factories: Borg Warner, Muncie, IN; BPB Celotex, Lagro, IN; and Delco Remy, Anderson, IN. The closing of these factories have damaged the communities in which I live. As a kid Delco Remy was still a driving presence in the economy, I remember speaking with an elderly lady who felt embarrassed as a child because her dad didn’t work at “Delco.” She said, “All my friends dad’s worked at Delco.” Now no one works at “Delco.”

Borg Warner in Muncie closed down just over a year ago. This was the first factory I began studying. I was initially drawn to the vast complex because of its visual shapes and the mystery of its motionless structure, but the more I explored the factory, the reality of what it had meant to countless families became unavoidable. I overheard conversations in line at the bank, at coffee shops, and from church about people who had lost jobs just short of retirement. What had sparked an idealistic artists imagination turned out to be something very personal for many people. The idea that the only redemptive action left for the building that had provided so much for so many was to simply sit and let an artist create pictures from it was pathetic. At the same time it was beautiful.

I have created boxes for each factory. The boxes contain multiple paintings within each. There is a dissonance between the boxes and the factories. The factories were created purely for function and mass production. They produced things that were needed. They provided jobs. They put food on families’ tables. The boxes do nothing. They are painstakingly created one of a kind objects. They could not be further from the original purpose of the factories, yet they are monuments to the factories and the people who passed through. They are tombstones. We create tombstones for a person’s life. The tombstone has no function and says virtually nothing about the person whose life it represents. It doesn’t say if they were good or bad, and it doesn’t say whether they deserved to live or die. They simply make us pause and remember that something once was that now isn’t. They are important.

The exhibition gives this pause. Paintings are hidden in the boxes so that the viewer has to stop and search. I don’t want all the paintings to be easy to view. I want to force us to stop and make time. They say very little yet they represent something. They represent generations that have come and generations that have gone.

      Artist Statement

C.S. Lewis said, “No man would find an abiding strangeness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.”  If we are unable to find inspiration in the simplest things then even the extraordinary will soon become mundane, but to the person who takes the time to look and explore the lowest of subjects, even the mundane will become something magical. I find empty rooms and mud puddles to be fascinating.  I firmly believe that I could be stuck in an empty room for eternity and never exhaust the paintings and stories that could be created from such a place.  I don’t try to create what I see.  I try to convey to others where my mind goes as I look at the world.