Vera's Legacy
The story, fairy tale, nursery rhyme, and parable introduced me to this world with metaphors for life. They aided in tailoring my perception of the home and my family relationships. In these tales food or still life as metaphor maintains a role as worthy and essential as the characters themselves.
The still life and the photograph have been either an undercurrent or the forefront of my work for the past ten years. I have returned to both the still life and the family photograph in Vera’s Legacy. This work plucks family stills from a collection of home movies that surveyed the late 1930’s to the early 1940’s; a family I never knew but longed for through many anecdotes. The chosen grid format shadows an ambiguous sense of time lapse that has been stolen from the film. At the same time, I am oscillating between the arrested time and movement of lives once lived. I am capturing these fluttering lives and sealing each for my collection within a visual rhyme of Vera’s Life, 96 years and still alive.
Vera’s Legacy represents infinity, though truly not infinite. I always had a problem answering those math questions that requested the definition between infinite and finite. I believed there must be an end to everything no matter how large the number gets. Infinity simply becomes a blur between beginnings and endings.
Traditional still life material such as fruit has always been of interest to me as a subject worth exploring. As it is an ephemeral object, it must be depicted in a photograph, painting or sculpture in order to arrest and collect the qualities I desire. When filled with miniature furniture, the hollowed produce becomes a metaphor for an environment such as the kitchen, bedroom or bathroom, mimicking other famous ephemeral homes like the one that Peter’s wife lived in the nursery rhyme. Other produce function as containers that serve to protect my collection. The ephemeral fruit containers combined with images of lives once lived are an attempt to materialize the intangible and preserve them as my collection.
Vera’s Legacy represents the archetypes that merged with other parables creating a foundation of my beliefs in the real and imaginary that continue to carry me through life.
The still life and the photograph have been either an undercurrent or the forefront of my work for the past ten years. I have returned to both the still life and the family photograph in Vera’s Legacy. This work plucks family stills from a collection of home movies that surveyed the late 1930’s to the early 1940’s; a family I never knew but longed for through many anecdotes. The chosen grid format shadows an ambiguous sense of time lapse that has been stolen from the film. At the same time, I am oscillating between the arrested time and movement of lives once lived. I am capturing these fluttering lives and sealing each for my collection within a visual rhyme of Vera’s Life, 96 years and still alive.
Vera’s Legacy represents infinity, though truly not infinite. I always had a problem answering those math questions that requested the definition between infinite and finite. I believed there must be an end to everything no matter how large the number gets. Infinity simply becomes a blur between beginnings and endings.
Traditional still life material such as fruit has always been of interest to me as a subject worth exploring. As it is an ephemeral object, it must be depicted in a photograph, painting or sculpture in order to arrest and collect the qualities I desire. When filled with miniature furniture, the hollowed produce becomes a metaphor for an environment such as the kitchen, bedroom or bathroom, mimicking other famous ephemeral homes like the one that Peter’s wife lived in the nursery rhyme. Other produce function as containers that serve to protect my collection. The ephemeral fruit containers combined with images of lives once lived are an attempt to materialize the intangible and preserve them as my collection.
Vera’s Legacy represents the archetypes that merged with other parables creating a foundation of my beliefs in the real and imaginary that continue to carry me through life.
