fragment

When Los Angeles shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic, and most cities became ghost towns, I returned to making art for the screen, developing what has become a dynamic and multi- layered artwork that is readily disseminated. One of the things that thrilled me about making art for the internet (net art) was that it could exist beyond the traditional gallery space. I saw it as a new form of public art, easily accessible to all and a viable platform where unconventional narratives could be created by combining photographic images, drawings, short poetic texts, and animations through a succession of linked pages. The viewer actively “clicked” on images and words to engage with the work and move through the site. 

Since the beginning of the Pandemic, (March 2020) I have been creating a net art project that in many ways is a pandemic journal with reflections about what I see around me as I walk in my neighborhood (Santa Monica, CA) as well as react to events world-wide. I have created images, roll-overs, texts and animations. The site has about 200 pages (or more). It lives within an earlier net art project called Ghost City (www.ghostcity.com) and because it stems from the "S" square on the Ghost City website, I have called it Avenue S (www.ghostcity.com/avenue-s). To navigate one clicks on the red squares at the bottom of each page ( … ). Avenue S is a visual record of these disconcerting times as it includes imagery related to the pandemic and interpretations of this fraught national and global political moment. The project has become a document of this extraordinary moment in time that unveils regularly like a serialized novel. 

Returning to net art recently has been both a challenging and rewarding experience: challenging as I have had to relearn a lot of the HTML code used to create interactive webpages and rewarding because I love using this medium to create work. It is a pleasure every day to be inspired by what I see and to imagine an interactive scenario while I walk and then come home and create it. This immediacy engenders a feeling of freedom and is why I gravitated to net art originally. It is a dynamic and interactive form of art that can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. 

(Source: Author's description)

Work on We Descend began in 1984, when five words came unbidden into my mind: “If this document is authentic…” I had no idea what the phrase signified: Who’s saying this? What document? Why wouldn’t it be authentic? How would it be authenticated? By what authority? How would that authority be established? Where did the document come from in the first place? As I pondered these questions, a clutch of fragmentary writings began to appear under my hands — via the standard tech at the time: fountain pen, notebook paper, clipboard.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/we-descend/)

"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" pieces together fragments of history, poetry, video, photography and cartography collected during an extended stay in Rome. This work reflects upon certain gaps - between the fragment and the whole, between the local and the tourist, between what is known of history and what is speculative. Rome is among the largest and oldest continuously occupied archaeological sites in the world. Daily life is complicated, even for the locals. Everything is running late, circuitous, or quasi-rotto. Romanticism and pragmatism must coexist. My struggles with slang, schedules, and social vagaries reminded me acutely of when I first moved to Montréal. Understanding what's going on around me now seems to be less a question of the acquisition of language than one of overcoming the dislocation of being a stranger. In her poem The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide Montréal poet Anne Carson writes: "A stranger is someone desperate for conversation." I certainly found that to be the case. There were days in Rome that I did not, could not, speak to anyone. Oxford Archaeological Guide and cameras in tow, I tried to capture something of the impossibly elusive and fragmentary nature of language amid Rome's broken columns, headless statues and other, often unidentifiable, ruins.

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was produced in residency at OBORO’s New Media Lab with the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.