Artist Statement
Artist Statement
History is broken down into countless pieces of fact. However, when it is woven together as a whole, does it often lose its truth?
The fragment of knowledge gathered after centuries of living and in how simple it is to create believable facts where there are none is staggering. The art of the half-truth can alter the perception of the past or the future. History becomes a fluid construct that is easily bent, depending on the sources used or in the ability to establish authority.
With the ever-increasing reduction of information due to short attention spans, brief media bytes and the loss of the library’s influence allows for a more rapid spread of misinformation in the guise of truth. The gray area between truth and fiction is where my work resides.
The works created are a grouping of truths and half-truths based on parallel research of ancient civilization, fin de siecle and contemporary attitudes in an ardent effort to create newer truisms over and over again until they become a new history of the world.
Through an intervention with text, objects, and the traditional formats and trappings of contained knowledge, historical narratives become altered and contemporized. These historical documents are manipulated to the point where fact and fiction lines blur. The new work acts as a catalyst for reevaluating the validity of traditional historical narratives by creating newer fictionalized histories, which highlight irrational or problematic ideologies long overlooked over time.
What was once a cast-off allusion to the past becomes alive again but with new identity, rooted in modernity and footnoted by the past.