For many years my drawings have been about the recording of contents...contents of women's bags and cars and refrigerators (long before security guards and government officials regularly were examining these same containers).

The latest work's concern is---Where does that money you send off to the IRS every April end up? Colored pencil drawings exhaustively document thousands of items used by various agencies; from the NYC Department of Public Health (the virology lab), to Materials for the Arts, the Parks Department, and the Department of Education. Drawn lists show the purchases of the Defense Department (including such objects as Daisy Cutters and Global Predators). There are drawings that are symbolic depictions (with names and ages) of each of the close to 2,400 Iraq War coalition casualties and 11,000 civilian casualties (a small fraction of the unknown actual number).

In addition I am working on a series of works on paper that combine painted newspaper clippings, internet flyers and other sources of information, with related suggestive drawn and painted elements extracted from earlier drawings.

December, 2005

My drawings are archaeological/ anthropological in nature. They involve unearthing buried objects of all kinds from the mundane to the unexpected. The objects are located in various forms of containers including women's bags, personal and institutional refrigerators and vehicles. In addition I have been documenting art by creating extensive drawn lists. This too involves digging below the surface, to find the known, as well as the obscure or forgotten.

Currently I am working on the series Everything in Her Bag, Thirty-Two Fridges and Fifty-Five Vehicles. The concept of these drawings emerged from the initial project, Everything I Own, where I drew my 13,127 possessions. This work all serves as a form of portraiture- thus I choose participants in the bag, refrigerator and vehicle projects with the desire to depict a range of ethnicity, profession, class and age. The work then becomes a collaborative; the owners of the containers accumulate/ select the contents. The institutional containers- the fire engine and the zoo and doctor refrigerators give a glimpse into a world not generally seen up close. The scale -all objects are drawn roughly the same size, creates a slight uncertainty as to the actuality of the objects (are they toys or models?) as well as the "hieroglyphic" forms.

Unearthing and documenting art, whether it be hidden because it is the work of casual artists who would never think of exhibiting their work, or work that has traditionally been categorized with craft, design or fashion is part of the impetus behind Everybody Gets One. So far I have drawn over 1000 postage -stamp-sized reproductions of other people's art, arranged alphabetically on 27 sheets on five foot by one foot pieces of paper -(the 27th is for unknown artists). There is a separate database with information about the artists and works. These drawings have been shown as a performance piece- artists have brought their work in to a NY gallery where I drew their work on site. Through the ordering and juxtapositions of these items narratives often emerge -inadvertently or intentionally.

December, 2001