When my friends at Red Door Gallery in Oakland asked me to participate in their July, 2009 show, Shedding, I immediately accepted. Transition and transcendence have always been themes in my photomontage series, Desolation's Comfort. Whenever I'm asked to participate in a themed show, I try to go with the first impressions my imagination brings to me. In the this case, I had in my mind's eye the image of a giant snakeskin having be shed and blowing in the wind. Movement and scale are elements that I've always wanted to play with and incorporate in my prints. I therefore set out to create large banners to be hung from the rafters of the gallery.
Dabbling in artistic discovery eventually drives me back to my more formal work. I can always feel it. At a certain point while drifting down the river I feel the need for structure. I crave a mooring, maybe even some solid land. Desolation's Comfort is a body of work that began with my MFA graduate show in 2007. On and off, I return to it, for it is the work that seems to express my most inner place. Today, I am back again.
I’m honored to be part of a new show with my dear colleagues, Rosa Valdez and Philip Ringler. The show, opening on January 29th at the Eddie Rhodes Gallery, Contra Costa College, is called *Reinventing Memory*. Each of us brings a different perspective to memory and past. If you are in the area please visit the show and give me your feedback.
My MFA Show, *Desolation's Comfort: Photographic Recollections* opened at the John F. Kennedy University Arts & Consciousness Gallery on October 1, 2007. It's been a year. Creating big shows is like giving blood. It takes awhile for the body (in this case, *soul*) to replenish itself. It was hard for me to look at the images from that show for quite some time. This week, I took the dust off the metaphorical storage box and started working on my *Desolation's Comfort* images yet again. It was finally time to revisit the work and add new images to the collection.
