Shadow Box Series

The Shadow Box photographs, my continuing project, were developed with drawings, starting in 1988, combining two related but parallel lines of development in my career as an artist. Drawings, unrelated in image, help establish the graphic “feel” of the photographic image. The sets and objects in the photographs are fabricated, found, or found and altered. The tableaux are scale-less conundrums hinting at the limits and limitations of knowing. The formal qualities of the images perfectly mirror the circumstances and emotional tone of my life. I consider the prints (silver and platinum) to be the final product of this conceptual drawing and fabrication process. The installations are given their formal and perceptual context in the photographic print. I have been working since early 1997 with hand coated platinum prints (as I did in the ‘70’s), to gain a greater sense of depth and solidity in my images. In so doing I believe I have appropriated the graphic qualities I achieved in drawing and printmaking to assert the uniqueness of conception in my photographic images.

The Aras are all platinum prints, printed on Arches Platine paper. They are made from 6×6 negatives and positives, some are enlarged onto ortho film, some are inkjet negatives.