Archeology of the City

Archeology of the city. Archeology of man. The work I make evolves around myself, my places, my desires, my experiences, my connection to man and the changes of time. People come and go and leave traces behind. This is the archeology of the city, the archeology of man on one level. Nature plays a role in my work. The elements change the landscape (the cityscape). Patina develops and the futile, unimportant remnants left behind by man become omniscient objects with personalities and ‘gestaltes’ of their own. In this work organic paper remnants, found throughout the cities where I lived and walked are left carelessly behind. They are fugitive in the scheme of life and yet were tellers of fashion, advertisements, cultural festivals and plays and so wreak of love, passion and also man’s ever growing materiality. In their forgotten state a new story unravels. They are like fossils, cliffs. Like the layers of the earth within which the lost cities of man reside. Archeology of the city, archeology of man on another level. Their colours are now that of the earth; ochres, ultramarine, turquoise, and siennas. They are the earth, the cliffs, the stones, the fossils, and become the pigments with which man tells his stories. From Lascaux to Kiefer, and with which I make my ‘paintings’ …my Polaroids. Each image, man’s remnants, has become my pigments. The images are mounted in layers, --the layers of the city, the layers of the earth. The margins provide white lattices of the window through which we look, through which we see. An intimate memory. A face. The bark of a tree. The river bed, the field but always the remnants of things abandoned by man, the archeology of in this case, the city.