Art Home and Away: A look at the Past and Present of my Artistic Development

This week, inspired by National Public Radio’s This I Believe program, I will be writing a more personal post, focusing on the core values and beliefs that guide my daily life as well as my chosen profession.

Some years ago, a friend asked me why I was not seeking financial security and going into the family business. “And what business would that be,” I asked laughingly, “that of the Town Sage?” My father was, indeed, the Sage of his town. I remember walking with him in the streets. He had such presence that everyone who passed him could not help but turn around for a second look. We would walk to the baker’s and an old man or a young doctor or a new father would hold his hand and ask him to converse awhile, to hear their troubles. He always did, and always knew what to say, how to ease people’s pain, how to give them hope, how to jolt them out of their paralysis. I remember once he took me to visit a man who had just lost his young son. The grieving father, surrounded by friends and family, wept as though he was determined to weep for as long as he lived. In fact, he had not stopped since the news of his son’s passing. When he looked into my father’s eyes, the pain of the world was in his own two black circles. My father sat before him and began to speak. As the man sobbed, the sage spoke of his own life, of all that he knew, all that he believed. He spoke and spoke until his voice was no longer drowned by the poor man’s sobs. When he finished, there wasn’t a tear amongst us all.

My father believed in the power of self-expression. And this I, too, believe. Though I spent most of my life without him, I was always aware that he was a revolutionary, a man who had sacrificed much of his life for the political well-being of his people. Watching him, I learned that the power to effectively express one’s beliefs and experience is the power to bring about change, to be active in a world marked with passivity. As Pablo Picasso explains, “art is an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.”

As a child of immigration, my artistic practice is, for me, the ultimate attempt at taking an active role in a life whose direction throughout my early youth was largely decided by states and politicians. In turning to the visual arts, I was in search of an underlying, common language to relay my own experience, while touching on specific facets of the contemporary human condition. As such, my work expresses a deep interest in the investigation and comprehension of space, both literal and metaphoric. In reality, it deals not only with space, but the spaces in between (created by everything from physical barriers to history and national borders,), thereby examining agents responsible for the formation and maintenance of a modern condition. I am drawn to themes concerning the earth in relation to humanity, and more specifically, humanity’s perceived conquest and division of the earth. In the past, I have explored these themes as a macrocosmic view of individual and state endeavors, often adopting specific political and societal practices as foundations for the creation of a body of work.

Each piece often carries with it a strong sense of local and global history, placing my use of the ephemeral in a larger context of time. In a recent exhibition (pictured here), for example, where 3000 lbs of salt recreate, on the gallery floor, a pseudo-topographical map of the continents inspired by satellite images of the Earth at night, the overwhelming spread of light, as well as its absence in select areas of the planet, are indicators of the patterns of human history. Similarly, the history of salt, while enmeshed with the Earth, is a history of civilizations. In its productive form (salt as currency, food and preservation), it is linked to notions of creation and rising nations, while in its destructive form (“salting the land”), it is a cruel force of destruction.

In my practice, I deal with issues such as migration, division and displacement not only on the level of global power structures (creating photographs that manipulate national borders or draw walls through imaginary landscapes) but also on a personal and sensual level (installations that deal with sense memory, nostalgia and movement). After all, as artist/choreographer Yvonne Rainer exclaims in reaction to the horror of media images of the Vietnam War in 1968, it is “the body that remains the enduring reality.” Politics enter my work in the same way that visual aesthetics do; they do so only when detrimental to the experience. I do not look for them. They are both natural derivatives of a particular personal relationship with the world. My aesthetic choices, I have found, are often fueled by my own cultural experience and draw on forms and images that have become moving to one people while enigmatic to others. I strive to present each specific issue as both an insider and an outsider, while conveying a bridge between the two. Each piece, then, functions, at once, esoterically, subconsciously, and exoterically and self-consciously. In that, my works are places for me both to speak and to search.