Paul Roorda

This series acts to complement the Adorro project of AI works to examine ideas of truth and artifice using the types of materials and methods that I have used in many recent series.  Using pages of fiction that I have written, presented with the appearance of having been torn out of real novels, I create complex life-like characters caught in a moment, out of context, without past or future.  These pages are included in mixed media works that incorporate vintage found images as well as recent prints and photos of my own that act as associations rather than illustrations of the text.  This series provides the kind of glimpse of a person observed or overheard in passing, a situation in which we might make quick judgements or conclusions but are left with the knowledge that we can know very little.  We are left with impressions and feelings, and certainly questions.

Adorro's paintings are all copied from AI generated images. Adorro is an AI "alter-ego" of Paul Roorda, created to explore ideas of truth and artifice in art as well as the implications of AI on the arts. See the Adorro - Process section of this website for more information and go to my blog to read conversations between Paul Roorda and Adorro.

As part of a new project titled Fake Meets Fiction: AI, Analogue, and Art, I am exploring how AI can be used in art as well as considering the wider implications of the increasing use of artificial intelligence in society. This is a two part project, the abstract paintings of work of Adorro and the mixed media works in the "Fiction" series by Roorda.

This project is part of a wider exploration of truth and artifice in art and in society. With the recent availability of AI as a tool for text, image and video, we need to ask questions about the implications of its increased use in the general public and online.

Recent blog posts in the Adorro & Roorda Conversation series were created using ChatGPT for all text under the name Adorro. Adorro is an “alter-ego” artist I have created to explore these issues more fully. All text and images by Adorro have been created using artificial intelligence software easily available online. The blog conversation series really is the heart of this project. In it, I have very real conversations between myself and the AI generated Adorro, conversations that demonstrate the power and limitations of AI and, at face value, discuss the conceptual issues of this project.

This part of my website for the Adorro project demonstrates how an alter-ego is created using AI generated content. Titles, images, conversations and artist statements are all created using ChatGPT and image generation software. The artists hand (in other words, my hand) is used only to copy the generated image using paint and canvas. I have also had a strong hand in selecting from the titles, texts and images that AI generation software has presented me with, selecting that which I feel "fit" with my vision of the project, so in that sense I have not let go of my role as artist.

My role is also one of creator in that I have shaped the character of Adorro in the wording of the prompt for ChatGPT. For these conversations, I have begun with giving ChatGPT these parameters: "Let's have a conversation, you and me, with you playing the role of Adorro, an abstract artist. Make your responses interesting and sometimes humorous. Be opinionated at times, and not so diplomatic as usual. Ask me questions in a conversational way as well. Try to avoid artsy fartsy language so that you sound intelligent as a contemporary artist. You may use my name, Paul. Keep your answers short, like a paragraph or so, and show a bit of attitude and humour. So let's go ahead..."

To see Adorro's art go to www.adorro.ca.

All text on Adorro's website is also generated using ChatGPT.

Added to this section of the portfolio are two mixed media works which explore ideas of truth and artifice by using false pages of novels. While it appears that the page of text may be a draft of fictional writing or a page torn from an old novel, a single page of an unknown larger fiction is created for each mixed media work. More from this series can be seen in my "Fictions" gallery on this website.

With Tally, a vintage mortuary body tray, used for many years at a nearby hospital, has been transformed into a sculpture that challenges the viewer to consider mortality, time and suffering. The dented and scratched stainless steel, polished to a reflective finish in the form of a human figure, has become a mirror for the viewer, a memento mori for self-reflection.

Tally confronts one with their own likeness, their own mortality, and their own complicity and responsibility for the suffering of those around them. First seen from a distance, a reflection of light and an anonymous figure are transformed into the distorted likeness of the viewer upon closer approach, finally sharpening into clear focus as one comes face to face with their own image mirrored in the body tray.

A tally, engraved into the steel surrounding the figure, marks the passage of time. It is a stark reminder of the limited days, weeks, and years we walk this earth. It counts the dead, records the lost, and remembers the forgotten. War, pandemic, environmental disaster, migrant deaths at sea, unmarked graves of indigenous children, the opioid crisis…the news is full of reminders, and with each tragedy, the numbers are counted.

Tally is a challenge to use our limited time to look deeply into and then beyond ourselves. It is only grim and hopeless if we don’t follow awareness into the possibility of compassion and change.

A Moment Between is a collection of tilts, blurs and misdirections preserved by the accidental click of the camera’s shutter, capturing distortions and errors in composition, exposure or focus. These are the photos in between, the ones normally deleted and retaken, still there among the many worth keeping in my photo archive. Further abstracted by the rich blue of the cyanotype photography process, the insignificant and accidental are elevated to something worthy of deeper consideration. The collection of vaguely decipherable images suggests a dreamlike collage of unsure memories, fleeting glances, overheard fragments of conversation or momentary déjà vu.

A Moment Between captures reality as if it was the last semi-conscious thought before sleep or the morning’s first wakeful awareness as dreams begin to slip away from memory’s weak grasp. Like musical notes that wander off key to create melodic intrigue, these accidentals are a reverie of images that hold a mystery of tension and beauty.

The poetic compositions of this series draw connections between our momentary here and now and the years and decades behind and before us. Like a long look through the window of an old house into a daydream of memory and possibility, these works open a place for the intimate thoughts, feelings and experiences that take place at a human scale in the context of the loud and invasive world we sometimes need to retreat from.

Somewhere Anywhere Postcards is a series of handmade limited edition cyanotype prints that form the basis of a mail art project. Each image of a wall can also be seen as a landscape with markings suggestive of sky, land, and horizon. Poetic musings on the back, replacing typical travel narratives, explore themes of freedom and barriers, hope and challenge, and the possibility of seeing from multiple points of view, all inspired by these images of aging deteriorating walls.

Cyanotype was among the earliest forms of photography and in the early 1900s this process was used in the production of post cards depicting both local events and disasters when newspapers rarely included photos. Working from a collection of photos of weathered surfaces taken in Waterloo Region, Canada and abroad, the imagined landscapes on these postcards are a consideration of time, nostalgia, and the human response to climate crisis.

Printed individually in Prussian blue and warmed in colour by toning with tannin, the typed and handwritten text, along with vintage stamps make these 4 x 6 inch postcards an art object created with a very personal touch. At a time when art galleries are closed or restricting attendance, delivering art into mailboxes reminds people that there is creativity beyond the screen. And although social media has virtually replaced postcards and recent pandemic realities mean no one is traveling anyway, a postcard from nowhere takes on even greater meaning. In isolation, we can still discover beauty and hope.

At the same time, this art deals with climate change. The landscapes have the beauty and peace that nature has to offer, but also show cracks and peeling paint. These vistas are suffering the same deterioration that neglected walls do. And like an old walls, our climate will deteriorate without action.

Paul Roorda is grateful for the support of the Waterloo Region Arts Fund for this project.

Twilight Vision is a series of cyanotype prints of old walls. Like the Horizon Muse paintings, these are landscape images found on cracked and weathered walls.

Working from photos of old walls found locally and from around the world, I use one of the earliest forms of photography to create the prints. Put simply, a cyanotype print is made by brushing light sensitive chemicals onto watercolour paper, exposing it to sunlight or artificial UV light through a full size negative to make a contact print, and then developing it in water. The result is a monochromatic photograph with beautiful tones of Prussian blue.

Looking into the sky and out to the horizon has always been an opportunity for beauty and peace, but also can be weighted with anxiety. We see a wall as protection, or as a barrier, but can we see past or even through the wall, into a more optimistic vision of what could be? Ideas of memory, loss and grieving are conjured by the deteriorating wall, but sky imagery is an opening to hope. This is a fresh look at old walls and ageless skies, walls and skies that tell a human story of passing time. It is a search for poetry and meaning in that which is overlooked and unremarkable, offering possibility and beauty in times of uncertainty.

These very small acrylic paintings are loosely inspired by memories of seascapes and the cracks and textures of old walls. Like the Seeing Through Walls painting series, they capture both the openness of landscapes while suggesting surface markings of weathered walls. Completed over the course of a few months in early 2020, they are informed by photos of walls taken over the past few years as well as the view over an icy, snow-covered lake to a grey winter sky seen through the window as I worked.

Earlier in my career, I had a number of exhibitions of "Wallscapes":  Paintings of  distressed and weathered walls that also acted as abstract landscapes. In recent years, I have returned to this project with new paintings and drawings that are an extension of this early work. And while the medium and look are much different than the mixed media art of the past decade, themes of climate change, passage of time, and the power of aging objects to tell a story are threads that run through this new work as well.

This series, Seeing Through Walls, includes paintings of aging weathered walls that offer visions of distant horizons and timeless skies. My recent paintings reflect an interest in combining two opposing experiences: On the one hand, the solid, aging walls that make up cities around the world and on the other hand, the wide open spaces and skies of traditional landscapes. As paintings of walls there is a focus on surface qualities:  Cracks, stains, texture, crumbling plaster and peeling paint bring the eye to the two dimensional surface of the painting. As abstract landscapes, horizons of land, sea, or ice are suggested by cracks or borders in the wall. Areas of subtle texture and modulating tone suggest the expanse of skies and clouds. There is a constant tension between the two-dimensionality of the surface, as a painting and as a representation of a wall, and the illusion of depth when seen as a landscape.

Working from photographs of old walls from around the world, the art is titled according to the original location of the wall being represented. And by creating visions of turbulent or anxious skies found in weathered and deteriorating walls, the weight of climate change is a constant presence in these works.

This body of work is an investigation of how we create, distort, and interpret meaning in a dramatically changing world of constant information. It examines our conflicting responses to climate change:  Anxiety, complacency, guilt, denial and paralysis, as well as the possibility of hope and action are considered. Ideas without context, images without text, and data without labels are all manipulated and obscured, leaving us adrift in uncertainty and speculation. We want to make sense of the information but are left with multiple interpretations, incomplete conclusions and the feeling that we should have already figured out what we still can’t understand.

By including my own photographs and cyanotype prints, internet satellite image screenshots as well as found objects, vintage family photos and images from old reference books, these works refer to the urgency of climate change and the anxiety that it causes. Reminiscent of unsettling dreams, the surreal quality of the work interrupts the nostalgic backwards glance with disturbing reversals, inversions and juxtapositions.  Skies, clouds and oceans, often seen as peaceful and calming are presented with an uncertain edge in this art. References to the science of weather point to the documentation of changes that have already occurred and predictions of catastrophes to come, but the data here is incomplete and confusing in the context of competing images and ideas.

This series acts as an idiosyncratic collection of found images, a poetic warning, and a cabinet of curiosity.  It is about amusement as much as it is about serious understanding of ideas, feelings, and beliefs and the creation and manipulation of meaning in troubling times.

Cabinets of curiosity relate to my own practice of collecting, assembling, and altering found objects while exploring the intersections of belief, science, culture, and the environment. This project is a personal collection, an artful arrangement, an experiment in creating meaning. It is an altered nostalgic past, an anxious present moment, and a poetic warning about our climate future. It is about the meaning of artifacts, art, and commonplace objects as well as the ways and places we store and display them. It is about the work of the collector, the artist, and the curator, sometimes one in the same person, and sometimes as collaborators in creating meaning. It is about amusement and curiosity as much as it is about serious understanding of ideas and beliefs.

Presenting valuable and commonplace objects on walls as well as on shelves, in cabinets or boxes, under glass domes or in vitrines, or in bottles and containers, the methods of display would keep some things visually protected, others exposed, and yet others, requiring the act of opening a drawer to be seen. I hope to create a microcosm of our nostalgic present, a spectacle of visual intrigue, and a cryptic and poetic warning of the precarious place in which we humans are leaving the world for our children.

These interactive metal boxes, found fixed on wooden utility posts around downtown Waterloo, are meant to amuse and disturb, entertain and provoke thought. They are an unexpected discovery in a familiar place. Reminiscent of memorials, music boxes, street art, cabinets of curiosity, and museum collections, Time Stops invite people to step out of their thoughts and intended path to observe and listen to an intimately scaled poetic warning. Clock mechanisms tick and occasionally alarms ring, perhaps notifying a passerby to pay attention. Familiar tunes are made mysterious and melancholy by removing chimes from music box mechanisms.  

By juxtaposing the altered music of a child's music box with nostalgic images of floods and skies, accompanied by vintage clocks and curiosities, viewers are gently challenged to reconsider notions about our place in a world of changing climate. Time on a human scale is contrasted to geological time. We notice the weather change from day to day, but sensing the change in climate presents a challenge. Our trust in science wavers as we stand in paralysis or complacency as the alarms are ringing.

This project is also about how art is perceived in public spaces rather than galleries. By capturing the audience as people pass by and by anonymously presenting an object of curiosity, the viewers are left to make sense of the object. Is it art? Is it a game? Or something else? And how does one make sense of this interactive musical box of curios without the gallery's white wall, label, and description. The only guide is the changing sky itself, and the sun, the rain, or the cool breeze to bring to mind a clarity or deepen the mystery as one listens and looks.

Using vintage clocks, music boxes, barometers, and weather recording devices, the kinetic sculpture I create is at once playful and disturbing. Distorting nostalgia by transforming and combining found objects, I create slow moving sculpture where water drips or mechanical devices gradually unwind to create a sense of anticipation and apprehension. In this context, familiar objects tell a new story; what we believe about the past is challenged. Old and often obsolete mechanisms are pulled out of their original machines and harnessed as the source of motion for poetic constructions of objects and images.

In some works from this series, clock mechanisms trigger a sudden flapping of a wing or the unexpected rocking of a paper boat in a chemist's flask. In other pieces the viewer rings an office desk bell to startle a mechanical canary in an antique cage or turns the knob of a music box to begin a haunting distorted song to accompany the slow spin of a barometer needle submerged in water. A gentle breath of air against butterfly wings causes a barometer needle to waver, exposing the individual viewer's complicity in climate change. In a larger installation, glass jars fall off a shelf over several hours and smash on the floor as ice melts and causes a shift in the centre of gravity. In another installation, paper boats tied to threads are slowly pulled by a hygrothermograph, typically used by galleries to monitor internal climate conditions. The boats glide towards the narrow passage between two glass domes so gradually that their movement is imperceptible and the resulting collision takes weeks to occur.

Skies, icebergs and ocean horizons are the subject of recent mixed media works. These works evoke the memory of clouds, the lapse of time visible in the melting ice, and the gradual rise in sea level. Fata morgana, the illusion of distorted horizons, visible when warm air moves over cold seas, is an element in the double horizon seen in some of these pieces and is an apt metaphor for the climate change we are anxiously experiencing.

Amid overlapping narratives of personal disaster, biblical apocalypse and scientific warnings of global climate change and rising sea levels, the artist becomes a character in his own fiction: Prophet, survivor, scientist, historian, and rescuer. Exploring an epic apocalyptophilia with layered nuance, Paul Roorda creates a story of the flood in art that incorporates a collection of vintage objects such as early 20th century disaster postcards, vacation photos, pages from Dante's Inferno, water safety manuals, life jackets, weather damaged notices and scientific glassware holding water from the River Styx.

This project looks at the way narratives are created, documented and memorialized in various forms of text and artifact. Images repeat and reflect, are magnified or suffer damage and distortion to expose and examine the undercurrents of the societal need to dwell on disaster and the accompanying fatigue and cynicism with our most recent warnings of catastrophe.

Found in an abandoned rural church in Lamlash, near Durham, Ontario, this installation suggests a tragic event of some kind. Elements of this work hint at a fictional community struggling with despair, wishing for hope: Remembering the past while apprehensive about the future. With the doors of the church locked most of the time, the only view of this forgotten memorial is through the dusty windows as if those who created it, left with greater concerns on their minds.

Using ashes, gold leaf and discarded texts, the work in this exhibition transforms traditional Christian art and ritual by creating ceremonial vessels, reliquaries and icons which reflect a neo-liturgical approach to the disposal of aged and damaged sacred texts. Deeply meaningful elements such as gold, eggs, fire and beeswax, are used in ways that transform the book and along with it, notions of the place of faith in society. This work pushes artistic technique and Christian ritual practice past their usual boundaries to create post-devotional, conceptual liturgical art.

The art recalls religious acts of devotion yet, at the same time, points to the loss of what is held as sacred. Each creative work is also an act of destruction. Beauty embraces its shadow. Each sincere moment is betrayed by duplicity. This art draws attention to the absence of an authoritative ritualized tradition for the disposal of sacred text in Christianity and in creating new rituals it fills a liturgical void with uneasy possibility.

Noticed in their public location, nailed and wired to street-side posts throughout Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, and Ottawa, the art briefly captures observant viewers, pulling them out of the insulation of their thoughts, if only for a moment, to wonder and create meaning of what they are looking at. Retrieved and presented as a collection in the gallery, the full implication of each project is experienced as the work is re-contextualized and larger themes become apparent.

In Take Notice, hundreds of small paper cards frame images removed from vintage encyclopedias. What was once the post war optimism of a vintage encyclopedia is now re-contextualized as an anxiety over the consequences of the unsustainable progress we have a compulsion to pursue.

In Sky Notice Polaroid photos of clouds are used to create art that is both prophetic and poetic, full of both whimsy and catastrophe. The photos suffer colour distortion or overexposure and are scarred by rust and water damage reflecting the increasing anxiety with which we have come to view the sky: Global warming, intensifying storms, increasing UV warnings, and smog alerts have cast a shadow on our once bright and optimistic upward view.

On slate tiles from the leaking roof of an old church, I create images that examine the tension between faith and knowledge.  In each slate tile, there is a hole, either found or cut.  Just as the roof has failed as a barrier to the rain, the boundaries of faith have been penetrated and confidence in knowledge compromised.   Using blood, ashes, and gold leaf, the images make references to the iconography of the church to expose the anxiety of a generation for which the idea of certainty has been eroded.

This body of work is a deconstruction and transformation of the Bible. By combining and distilling childhood experiences of church, new examination of Biblical text, religious art, and observations of the influence of religion on contemporary society, I explore a personal and societal ambivalence towards the Christian tradition.

In A Miraculous Cure for the Deaf, Shock and Abomination, and Once Daily, pages of the Bible or hymnbooks are individually removed, folded and rolled into tiny scrolls that are then placed in medicinal capsules. Similarly, in Antidote, Bible pages are rolled into scrolls or individually burned before containing them in vaccine vials. And in Seven (Heavenly/Deadly) red dye from the covers of Gideon Bibles is extracted, fermented to make wine, and placed in antique glass syringes. Displayed in a two-sided frame, the work is labeled Heavenly on one side and Deadly on the other. In Truth Serum, 70 vintage syringes have been filled this wine and mounted in a row. This series of altered Bibles extends a recent exploration of the relationship between faith, ritual, healing and judgment.

Survival Kit for Uncertain Times is a Bible whose text has been removed and replaced with a wilderness survival handbook and various emergency supplies.

Congregation of the Ambivalent is an installation of seventy altered Bibles. For this project, a set of old and worn pew Bibles has been reclaimed: The pages of each book have been individually wrinkled then smoothed flat by volunteers with varying degrees of devotion and ambivalence towards the Christian church. In this exploration of religious ritual each page is damaged, instead of read, to create a Bible in which the pages force the cover open and yet, at the same time, press against each other so that the text cannot be read. Each Bible is transformed into a new object, one of beauty and contradiction. The sacred is challenged by the profane, and embraced by it. The Bibles have become art, yet are still sacred texts. Tradition persists, but only wrapped in ambivalence.

In The Weight of Paper, a large antique Bible has been wrinkled and smoothed to create a similar Open Bible, yellowed with age. And for Open Bible III (Ash Cross)each page has been marked with a cross of wet ash, its pages wrinkling as it dried. In this body of work, the aim is always to find the point of tension between the weight of tradition and allure of change, between the desire for preservation and the hope for transformation, and between the demand of faith and the appeal of the secular.

Linking all of the works is a sense of unease about the traditions of the Christian church and a process that explores the role of ritual in contemporary society.

Confessions is an exploration of public and private rituals of guilt, confession, penance and absolution. In the black markings of candle smoke, fireplace soot, charred wood, burnt Bible pages, and coal dust, wrongdoing in general, and environment harm in particular, are acknowledged. Individual acts leading to global climate change result in a pervasive "eco-guilt".

The individual pages of the installation are personal acts of confession made public by posting them on utility poles using wire and the rusted nails and staples of previous signs. Public in location, they remain private in the wordlessness of the pages torn from discarded Bibles and glued over the black markings of confession. Words are replaced by simple lines and shapes of red clay, rust, blood or scorched paper.

Exposed to the elements, the notices become weathered, stained, torn or lost. The nails and staples are then pried from the wooden posts and the notices collected, pressed and restored. Finally, marks of ink, blood and gold leaf are added to the pages: Each sheet a confession, a statement, a record, a promise.

Accompanying each confession is an act of penance - a self-inflicted act of reflection, deprivation or punishment. A private act of penance performed by the artist on behalf of all.

Juxtaposing illustrations from vintage first aid manuals and antique Bibles, this series is an exploration of faith, medicine and ritual. There is an uneasy nostalgia for a simple faith and ritualistic acts of devotion or hope in a time when ambivalence has eroded confidence in institutions that seemed to offer such bright solutions. Worldviews of faith and science collide in times of illness, injury and death and we are forced to weigh our decisions on the balance of our beliefs.

In compositions reminiscent of altar-pieces or shrines, the beeswax surfaces in this art are marked with gold, blood, crushed stone and rust to reveal a desperate longing for Truth where only contradictory truths can be found. By acts of devotion, one tries to revive faith, but faith can only be bound in bandages or placed carefully on a stretcher and medicine can only hope for a miraculous cure. They both disappoint us in spite of our belief and repeated rituals. There is a bittersweet realization that the divine is brought to the level of humanity in the same moment as humans seek to be elevated to the level of the gods.

This body of work is, in a sense, a re-illustration of the Bible. Starting with pages from an aged and deteriorating antique Bible I cut away the text to create a frame for a beeswax surface. The result is a surface resembling a diptych, an ancient wax writing tablet. Materials are embedded in the wax or pressed and rubbed into the scratched and distressed beeswax surface to create ritualistic and text-like markings and images. Natural materials are chosen to create strong symbolic resonance with the traditional Bible stories as well as contemporary uses and abuses of religion. Themes of violence and judgment are contrasted with elements of hope and reverence to explore the persistence of Christian tradition in the face of increasing secularism.

In other work, the lines of Biblical text are recreated by sprinkling ash, crushed flower petals, earth and other materials onto waxed sheets of paper to create pages where the words have been replaced by dust. The meaning of the text has been obscured, but the form of the page remains.

Drawing on beeswax surfaces using natural materials, I explore themes of deterioration and regeneration.  Ideas of mourning, loss, aging, and memory are evoked in distressed and worn surfaces.  The disintegration of an object as it rusts or decomposes is contrasted with the re-creation of the object as a drawing.

An image of rusty nails is made by distressing and scratching a beeswax surface using the nails, and drawn using the rust collected from those tarnished nails. The object becomes the image.  Other works included powdered ash rubbed into the beeswax with gold leaf details.

Work from my game series explores well known games such as Chess, Scrabble and Snakes and Ladders as metaphors for understanding religion, war, knowledge and morality. Linking the historical and contemporary associations of game playing with religious text and natural materials is an ongoing pursuit in my art.

The ancient labyrinth is reemerging as a tool for contemporary ritual practice. In my art I borrow from labyrinths found in cathedrals, on coins, and carved in rock to explore themes of deterioration and regeneration.

In my work, the materials are chosen to reflect the types of symbolic materials rituals are made of: Wine, gold, tea, smoke, beeswax, handmade paper, flowers, earth, stones, string, wheat, etc. Processes are chosen in a similar way, often involving repetitive actions such as folding paper, holding objects over fire, immersing objects in water, sealing with wax, tying string, or burying objects. The resulting artifacts allude to both contemporary and ancient traditions, but are something new. They reflect our ties to nature, religion and history and question our separation from them.

I am interested in how pervasive ritual is in cultures throughout the world and in the way rituals become an essential part of life for people, even when they may be at a loss to describe in words the full meaning those rituals hold. My work also addresses the rejection of traditional religion, Christianity in particular, and questions how people deal with this loss. Do traditional rituals need to be replaced? If they do, what new rituals are being observed?

Paper Memory is an exploration of the history and identity of the City of Kitchener.   It is about who we are and who we have been, reflecting not only our German beginnings but also our increasing cultural diversity.  Using text and photos collected from within the community, as well as natural and manufactured materials, it examines ideas of remembering and forgetting.  Folding and tying the fragments of text or material into small parcels and coating them with beeswax is an act of preservation to oppose the deterioration and fading of the paper and organic contents.  In the quilt-like composition the patches become increasingly random.  One must search for and reassemble images and documents to find and restore meaning.  Our historical knowledge becomes fragmented but new connections are discovered in the unexpected juxtaposition of images and words.

This work incorporates the ritual processes of my other art while reinterpreting religious figures so often portrayed in history of art. In my choice of process, I am exploring the rise of alternative rituals and meditative practices in the shift away from Christian traditions and beliefs. And in my materials, I am considering the relationship of spirituality and the natural world as well as making reference to the stories of the subjects. By choosing family members as models, I am telling a personal story while revisiting pivotal moments in a historical and mythological one.

kunstraumno.10, Mönchengladbach, Germany

A Moment Between

My art is about perception, time and the fluid meaning of objects and images. It explores the possibility of seeing two things at once or discovering an alternative truth revealed in a shift of context or a newly revealed fact. Meaning is created with a change in point of view: A turbulent sky and horizon discovered in an old weathered wall, a dreamlike vision seen in the blurry photo taken at the accidental click of the camera’s shutter, or a universe discovered in salt and sunlight spilled across a table. Simple items arranged together as a collection take on new significance through transformation, juxtaposition and association.

A depth of meaning is found in the insignificant, the mundane or the overlooked. As with human experience, a moment can be momentous, a simple object or image can hold a thousand stories or memories, and a sideways glance can be remembered for a lifetime or simply forgotten in an instant.  

In its exploration of memory and time, these works evoke nostalgia then undermine it. Using the historical process of cyanotype photography, along with yellowed paper, vintage images and found objects the art mines the comfort of nostalgia. This nostalgia selectively forgets the past, chooses the desired vision of the present and conjures an anxiety or hope in its own idiosyncratic vision of the future.

This exhibition addresses deepening concerns about climate change, the evaporation of reality based beliefs and understandings of truth in society, the fear and isolation of Covid19, and the very human emotions of grief, anxiety, curiosity, and delight. There is a persistent tension between what is seen in the first look and what is revealed in the following moment with the meaning of an object or image in constant flux. The art creates the possibility of something beautiful that can instill wonder in one moment and hold an undercurrent of something troubling in the next.

Complete artist statement for each series follows:

A Moment Between

A Moment Between is a collection of tilts, blurs and misdirections preserved by the accidental click of the camera’s shutter, capturing distortions and errors in composition, exposure or focus. These are the photos in between, the ones normally deleted and retaken, still there among the many worth keeping in my photo archive. Further abstracted by the rich blue of the cyanotype photography process, the insignificant and accidental are elevated to something worthy of deeper consideration. The collection of vaguely decipherable images suggests a dreamlike collage of unsure memories, fleeting glances, overheard fragments of conversation or momentary déjà vu. A Moment Between captures reality as if it was the last semi-conscious thought before sleep or the morning’s first wakeful awareness as dreams begin to slip away from memory’s weak grasp. Like musical notes that wander off key to create melodic intrigue, these accidentals are a reverie of images that hold a mystery of tension and beauty. Completed during a winter of Covid lockdown, these are also psychological interiors that reflect the social isolation and confinement of this time.
(This series is a collection of eighty cyanotype prints.)

Twilight Vision

This series explores the visual, poetic, and conceptual possibility of creating the illusion of skies and horizons from photos of unremarkable aging walls. Using the cyanotype photography technique, I create abstract landscapes directly from my photographs. My preoccupation with weathered walls has resulted in thousands of photos of walls from around the world. Using the monochromatic Prussian blue of cyanotype photography I add an element of abstraction to these photos to create impressions of skies and landscapes. The resulting images suggest clouds, misty horizons, night skies, ice flows, shimmering lakes and distant coastlines found in the imperfections, cracks and weathered paint of the wall surfaces.
Looking into the sky and out to the horizon has always been an opportunity for beauty and peace, but also can be weighted with anxiety. We see a wall as protection, or as a barrier, but can we see past or even through the wall, into a more optimistic vision of what could be? Ideas of memory, loss and grieving are conjured by the deteriorating wall, but sky imagery is an opening to hope. This is a fresh look at old walls and ageless skies, walls and skies that tell a human story of passing time. It is an apt metaphor for the anxiety about the deterioration of climate as we once knew it. And it is a search for poetry and meaning in that which is overlooked and unremarkable, offering possibility and beauty in times of uncertainty.
(This series is a collection of fifty 8 x 10 prints and seventy 6 x 10 inch prints. Several larger prints will be created for exhibition as well.)

Seeing Things in Clouds

This body of work is an investigation of how we create, distort, and interpret meaning in a dramatically changing world of constant information. It examines our conflicting responses to climate change: Anxiety, complacency, guilt, denial and paralysis, as well as the possibility of hope and action are considered. Ideas without context, images without text, and data without labels are all manipulated and obscured, leaving us adrift in uncertainty and speculation. We want to make sense of the information but are left with multiple interpretations, incomplete conclusions and the feeling that we should have already figured out what we still can’t understand.

By including my own photographs and cyanotype prints, internet satellite image screenshots as well as found objects, vintage family photos and images from old reference books, these works refer to the urgency of climate change and the anxiety that it causes. Reminiscent of unsettling dreams, the surreal quality of the work disrupts the nostalgic backwards glance with disturbing reversals, inversions and juxtapositions. Skies, clouds and oceans, often seen as peaceful and calming are presented with an uncertain edge in this art. References to the science of weather point to the documentation of changes that have already occurred and predictions of catastrophes to come, but the data here is incomplete and confusing in the context of competing images and ideas.

This series acts as an idiosyncratic collection of found images, a poetic warning, and a cabinet of curiosity. It is about amusement as much as it is about serious understanding of ideas, feelings, and beliefs and the creation and manipulation of meaning in troubling times.
(This is a series of 9 mixed media works.)

As if a Memory

Related to Seeing Things in Clouds, the poetic compositions of this series bring a lighter touch to the similar themes: Images and found paper work together to draw connections between our momentary here and now and the years and decades behind and before us. Like a long look through the window of an old house into a daydream of memory and possibility, these works open a place for the intimate thoughts, feelings and experiences that take place at a human scale in the context of the loud and urgent world we sometimes need to retreat from.

Time Stops

These interactive metal boxes, found fixed on wooden utility posts around downtown Waterloo, are meant to amuse and disturb, entertain and provoke thought. They are an unexpected discovery in a familiar place. Reminiscent of memorials, music boxes, street art, cabinets of curiosity, and museum collections, Time Stops invite people to step out of their thoughts and intended path to observe and listen to an intimately scaled poetic warning. Clock mechanisms tick and occasionally alarms ring, perhaps notifying a passerby to pay attention. Familiar tunes are made mysterious and melancholy by removing chimes from music box mechanisms.

By juxtaposing the altered music of a child's music box with nostalgic images of floods and skies, accompanied by vintage clocks and curiosities, viewers are gently challenged to reconsider notions about our place in a world of changing climate. Time on a human scale is contrasted to geological time. We notice the weather change from day to day, but sensing the change in climate presents a challenge. Our trust in science wavers as we stand in paralysis or complacency as the alarms are ringing.

This project is also about how art is perceived in public spaces rather than galleries. By capturing the audience as people pass by and by anonymously presenting an object of curiosity, the viewers are left to make sense of the object. Is it art? Is it a game? Or something else? And how does one make sense of this interactive musical box of curios without the gallery's white wall, label, and description. The only guide is the changing sky itself, and the sun, the rain, or the cool breeze to bring to mind a clarity or deepen the mystery as one listens and looks.

For complete galleries of each of these series scroll to the bottom of this page.