A la Recherche du Centre Exact

1996 - 1997

The title of this series refers both to Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu and to a poem by the American poet, Galway Kinnell. The Proust reference points to the imagery's attempt to deal with distant (perhaps even uterine?) memories.The Kinnell poem speaks of a man and a woman finding the "exact center" and thereby the divinity of each other and themselves through the sex act. The series deals with our sense of loss and alone-ness, our attempts to unite with another, the beauty and extraordinary power of this union, and the cycle of loss and union. Each image suggests an immense space, within which floats/falls/flies either a solitary figure or a pair of figures entangled in copulation.

The series also continues my formal concern with the ambiguities between three-dimensionality and two-dimensionality. The final images convey both a sense of very dense space while being simultaneously, in certain ways, extremely flat and graphic.

The images in this series were developed on a three-dimensional computer modeling system, making use of a variety of techniques to achieve a sense of dense space. Some of these involved scanning sections of hand-drawn charcoal and chalk drawings into the computer system in order to create atmospheric color. A final digital rendering of the three-dimensional scene was produced and then imported into a digital image manipulation program where the colors, composition and contrast were modified and fine-tuned.

Each image is printed on archval paper as a signed limited edition of 30.