About
About Me
Thanks for visiting! I am an artist living in the Hudson Valley of New York. I have a wife named Deb, and a son named Sam. In addition to almost forty years of making art, I have in recent times begun to write (both poetry and prose) and make music (mostly electronic). For a sampling of my music, click here. For my writing, check news, or write to me. Oh, and I also make caskets and run my local Chevrah Kadisha (the "holy society" entrusted with Jewish death and burial traditions).
About the Work
I think there's a certain state of grace common to both slapstick comedy and certain sculptures of the sixties and seventies: a sort of simultaneous manifestation and suspension of the laws of physics that allows the viewer to savor their phenomenological predicament, not just intellectually, but in a fully embodied way. For example:
Though not usually thought of as funny, the physics of Richard Serra’s “One Ton Prop (House of Cards)” allows it to function as a kind of suspended pratfall: an idea poised forever on the brink of coming fully to ground.
And in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.”, the comedy and pathos of Buster Keaton’s desire to redeem himself in his father’s eyes is registered, not in words, but on his body (and by extension, on ours), as he plunges through a series of collisions and near-misses into the hurricane.
This struggle between a work’s material conditions and what might be called its aspirations, has been a common thread in my work over the years. It's visible in the way the ephemeral (effects of light on translucent and reflective surfaces) and the provisional (the hang of stretched and draped materials) are both enabled and undermined by the necessities of structure and gravity. And it's visible in the way that seemingly mismatched materials are able to find a charged balance, nudging their awkwardness closer to grace.