“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, pic, look, eye, now, flick, here, there, swift, pace, up, down, in, out, why, how, who, what, where, eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, bing, bong, boom!” “Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!”

A line taken from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 written in 1953 (the year of my birth) and a science fiction projection that has slowly become a real experience of today.

And more headlines enveloping a view of views and cutting out views. Cut, Cut, Cut. “Quick. Click, look, eye, now, flick, here, there, swift, pace, up, down, in, out, why, how, who, what, where, eh, bang, smack, wallop, bing, bong, boom! Then in midair all vanishes.”

And new innovations of technology hurdle past our collective capacity to comprehend fully their implications.

I am interested in how knowledge and information has been contained, preserved and transmitted through time and how the role of the book has changed, as light technology becomes a dominant mode of transmission. During the Fall of '07, I created an installation in response to Fahrenheit 451 and explored issues of print and light media in contemporary life. Questions surfaced such as:

• How the pace of life affects what we see and don’t see, remember & forget.
• How the speed of technology alters one’s perception of time, space and light.
• How perceptions act as screens to reality.
• What remains and what is cut as technology encourages efficiency and speed?

I continue to explore these issues in iterations of Cuttings.

The world is dense and full of mystery and what we see and know of it is fragmented and incomplete and always changing. Cuttings offers a view of this world through our daily cuts.

Medium:
As the computer becomes a dominant mode of containing and transmitting knowledge and information, the printed book can be seen as a historical object and symbol of ideas stripped of its original use. I use the book as a symbol and its remnants as material for my work as I explore print and light media through printmaking, photography, and the computer. I work with these mediums as they speak to how we view today through screens and cuts from direct experience. Imagery alludes to the viewer and viewed.

I began this work by taking a cut from the Fahrenheit 451 installation and developed it to what is before you: cut old book covers in angled boxes, silk-screened silhouette target fragments over mirrors in angled boxes, prints of a growth ring from the end cut of a wood block and frame cuts.

The repetition of all in differing ways creates a poetic rhythm of sorts.

I hope to evoke a conversation between the felt and screened, the direct and distant, the visceral and thoughtful, and the textural and smooth by offering two distinct visual experiences of the viewed and experienced.

*CUTTINGS Also the name of a poem by Theodore Roethke and a focus of early work that spoke to my internal wresting of the creative process.

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