Complex Machines That Require Constant Monitoring, 2021. Series of archival ink jet prints and toner transfer on canvas, mounted on birch panel with traditional chalk gesso.

The base of this work began as large digital photographs on canvas produced between 2003-2008 for a project titled ‘Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,’ images made by re-photographing pictures from the front pages of the New York Times. Using a low-resolution cell phone camera, I re-presented key images from the U.S. ‘war on terror’, then printed them enlarged, saturated with color, and abstracted.

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Install view 2008

Ten years later in 2018, as social media dominated the visual sphere and over-saturated popular culture with images. I began erasing the pictures from the canvases. With the help of my two sons, I washed and scrubbed the pigments from the canvas to leave behind traces, remnants - ghost images.

In 2020/21 during the isolated period of the Covid-19 lockdowns, I returned to the canvases and cut them down into quarters, making them more intimate and furthering the abstractions. I collected captions from contemporary news photos and edited these descriptions – sometimes pulling out salient details, other times leaving them whole – and transferred them onto the scrubbed canvases to form new meanings and poetic associations.

This led to further investigations; combinations of words on pieced together scraps or pure white panels that leave space for the viewer’s own projections.