"Untitled, 1990"

Statement Accompanying Exhibition at Jan Kesner Gallery 12/92, Large Scale Photographic Work, exhibition dates12/29/92-1/16/93

The works in this phase of the exhibition are all large unaltered black and white photographs. They are photographs of handsful of flour thrown at painted backdrops. The backdrops are rather sloppily, and expressionistically painted. Clouds, the cosmos, and atmosphere, make up a vocabulary of the sublime, and the universal. The means involved here (throwing flour at shamelessly expressionistic backdrops) are pathetic and obvious. The vehicle (the photograph) is industrial, mute, dead. I am ultimately interested in distance. In the distance between the static expressionistic mark, or act, and the visceral desires which motivated it. In the distance between an actual experience of the natural (the sublime) and the coded iconography which attempts to represent it. In the distance of the photograph from the circumstances and substance from which it is an impression. And while I aspire to an emphatic revelation of artifice, I am equally intrigued by the insistence of iconography. It is in this collision of limits and potential that my interest resides.