My conviction rests on a plane of artistic good sense one moment, and teeters on the threshold of nonsense the next. My aim is to reconcile this conflict as little as possible.

I arrived at the tail end of modernism. The signs as I read them pointed simultaneously to reverence and patricide. Although I was loathe to relinquish the plastic rigor and severe beauty of the modernist canon, it seemed necessary, if any advancement was to be made, to ground the high flights and pollute the pure optimism of significant form with gestures, often blatant, toward a more scuffed reality. The coarse and the literate are key polarities in my work. Puns, for example, reduce words to the state of common material; when used in a title they tend to make the seriousness of an artwork plummet from its altitudes. Selecting from what’s handy and with a ragpicker’s thrift, I resemble a bricoleur, but one with enough discernment to find a path through the hodgepodge to gift wrap the confusion.