Art does not exist in a vacuum. Many influences exist for each artist which inform and inspire his or her work. These could be teachers, colleagues, famous names from art history, or chance discoveries at a local gallery. The artistic inspiration we receive rises largely from our interaction with others, either directly or through their work. In Homage, which showed in 2011 at the Rio Gallery in Salt Lake City, 30 artists paid tribute to their influences. Each artist's work was accompanied by documentation to explain whom they decided to honor and why.

On a group level, Homage acknowledged our part in a grand and growing tapestry of artistic influence. Just as making art is part of the human experience, so is sharing our work, our knowledge, and our thoughts with others. Our participation in this grand discourse is an essential element of what it is to be human. Homage is an effort to recognize and advance that discourse. 

Modern science proposes that matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only change state. Yet science also tells us that the universe is continually expanding. This cosmic quandary, a constant amount of matter/energy in a constantly growing universe, may find a parallel in the question of artists and influences. Given the myriad influences for each artist, it is difficult to point to any purely original idea. Perhaps the core elements of art, like matter and energy, are neither created nor destroyed — only expressed, reinvented, and re-expressed in an ever-expanding conceptual vocabulary, growing in widening spirals to fill the emptiness of space — space that was not empty after all. For the old stars are being built into new ones all the time. Art does not exist in a vacuum.

My Work

My work for Homage was inspired by the work of Kurt Schwitters, German collage, assemblage, and performance artist. While I tend to be most comfortable combining media, for this project I restricted myself to collage, revisited Schwitters’ work, and attempted to work in about the same size as he did. Following his convention, I tried to use found, or what I call “undesigned,” material as the basis for my work, and take titles from pieces of text that survive, either as whole words or partial words, in the final composition.

installation