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The creative cycle that generated the works in the “RE-FENESTRATIONS” collection, originally was initiated by my photo-shoot walks in countless urban environments; including my home of Los Angeles. My ambulatory forays lead me to explore neighborhoods, which, while including many travel destinations, tend to be mostly commercial and commonplace. Their specificity is not as important as the singular object and texture formations extracted from their vernacular settings to be abstracted on film. The visual elements thus gathered in these peripatetic wanderings subsequently form the iconic building blocks of larger and more intricate compositions. Sequentially numbered in keeping with musical naming conventions, these compositions revolve around certain themes and concepts I have developed over the years.

The window as metaphor has a large footprint in the history of Western art. It is an object whose function is to relate two realms: the inside and the outside, the public and the private. As an interface, it engages the two poles of a slew of other dichotomies. It is also an interface through which we apprehend the world and by extension, relate to each other. Furthermore, the window may act as a metaphor for language itself, which, as an agent of communication, hinges signifiers and signified. However, while interfacing two worlds, a window has us positioned on either side of its divide. Our vantage point is one of either looking in or looking out. The windows in this series do not look out onto an outer scene, they confront a viewer’s probing gaze with the partial display of a mysterious interior. They do not look out on an outside, but rather embody an attempt to look into an inside. By virtue of the glass with which they are framed, they mingle what they are willing to disclose with the audience’s own reflected image. Hence, the glass is integral to the works, not only in suggesting and mimicking a window, but because each piece is also a portrait simultaneously created anew with the viewer’s own reflection. The viewer’s perception is thus literally introjected as part of the work, and of the “inside” that is gazed upon.

Along with my meditations on the window as a connective and disjunctive apparatus, I have used its multi-paned incarnation as a device that facilitates a polyfocal vision. By allowing a plurality of visual elements to clash and intermingle on the same picture plane, I seek to elicit the sparks that engender new meaning.

“RE-FENESTRATIONS” has its roots in earlier bodies of work I developed such as my Streetlight collection, and the empty sign-holders of my Signs in Limbo series. Among other projects, I am currently working on an exhibition of the large scale works from the Signs in Limbo series, befittingly re-created and mounted on salvaged elements of the urban detritus from which the works spring.