Faithless Grottoes
2006-2009
In 2006, I incorporated digital imaging into my practice, reaping the slightly dizzying bounty of that technology. New possibilities for scale, colour, and nuances of manipulation were now available to me and from that came faithless grottoes. But I stuck with the original stills I’d made years earlier as my starting points. They’d become like totems for me, imbued with some intimate magic I felt bound to.... Through it all, the human figure remained the uncontested reference point. To this day there's nothing so devastatingly expressive for me as the human face and body, no visual element — in all its iterations and transformations — more capable of splaying open the human heart. Of course, there were many other elements injected into these tableaux — the surface detailing, the melding of foreground with background and subject, the bending of form and colouration — and these acted as supporting agents and accelerants. But the core setting for this work remained the same: those dark cathedrals of inner life, their architecture mapped out by patience, desperation, and delirium — all of it distilled through the human form. (Frank Rodick, in his essay on the fifteen works that make up Faithless Grottoes as well as the earlier Arena pictures of 2002-2005.)
