0:00As soon as I could hold a crayon I knew, and fortunately my parents encouraged it so I
0:07just grew up knowing that’s what I was and would always do.
0:12The moment where I actually made the transition was, I was doing a drawing and I wanted to
0:17put something else in it, so I found and old snapshot I had taken years ago and I cut out
0:23a little half-inch square and I colored it in.
0:26I thought, well that’s kind of nice. And pretty soon there was more photo and less drawing.
0:33And then finally I said the photos are more interesting than the drawings so that’s the
0:36direction I’m going.
0:38I collaborated on these works with my husband and partner Craig Dennis. Part of the universality
0:43of how great it is to show our work in someplace like Ankara – everybody looks at the sky and
0:49sees a cloud and projects some image on it. It’s just a natural thing to do.
0:55And so, by taking that further, Untitled is a collection of the word for God in 41 languages,
1:03just laid up, stacked out against a blue sky using those cloud letters.
1:09We were interested in the fact that pretty much every culture has a religion and has
1:16the idea that of a creator or a God, a diety. And even though the way that faith is manifested,
1:25the differences in religions they all aim for the same thing.
1:28There’s also the notion of a heaven or an afterlife or another world, usually kind of
1:33directed to the sky, sometimes to the Earth but that too is a universal.
1:38So we’re interested in how abstraction can be appreciated for itself, but much of the
1:44time the human mind just can’t help attaching a familiar representation to it, so we wanted
1:52to just take that impulse and run with it.
1:55One of the works in the show is called: “Entropy in Cinnamon Swirl. Chaos Simplicity” It’s
2:01a grid of slices of cinnamon swirl bread. 36 of them in a grid, and in the lower left
2:08corrner is the one with most perfect spiral, and then as they go horizontally they become
2:15more chaotic, but the one in the upper right corrner – its the breakdown of the spiral
2:21but its sort-of reconfigured into something that… we try to find some sense in. It looks
2:27like a cave painting of a bison.
2:30Some of them look like things by Paul Klee, or William T. WIley. People see other things
2:36in them. You know, once the image that was intended breaks down, that’s when abstraction
2:44happens and that’s when people insert their interpretations.
2:48I think not all photography aims to be art, and maybe art now is just opening up more
2:55to what people shoot everyday because we’re now used to thinking of photography as art
2:59whereas photography had a hard time breaking into the art world.
3:03There’s also a responsibility now that you realize if you want to make your art relevant
3:10to more people you need to be aware of what’s going on in the world. The small number of
3:16people who saw work I did 30 years ago at that time and now it’s just astonishing. It’s
3:24amazing. and I think artists who are emerging now start off with that. That they are going
3:32to address the world, and the people in the world no matter what situation they’re in.
3:37So I think it’s a fascinating change that’s happened.