Appearing, Disappearing, Reappearing: 
The Afterlife of Monuments in Our Times

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Drawings, Studio Works on Paper, Pictorial Essays and Framed Canvas  
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For over a decade, my art project, the Anna Pierrepont Series, has consisted of plein-air drawings, studio works on paper and often framed canvases, in addition to pictorial essays, that document the extraordinary appearances of effigies as I encounter them in real time and in varied states of ruin. 

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I coax the often buried traces of the past into visibility that cling to the corporal forms of effigies.

Wandering through many spaces, I apply a spontaneous approach to marking using graphite and colored pencils, pastels, oil sticks, gouache and acrylics that I hone in plein-air to coax images to emerge upon a variety of surfaces. Words are often applied to further illuminate the remaining shadows.

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Although often assigned to erasure and neglect, effigies possess a vitality that often in my images appears sentient.

That vitality amplifies the identities and aspirations of individuals and communities with the means to bring forth effigies in durable materials while consigning others' identities and aspirations to the ghostly domain of shadows.

Those shadows pulsate with vitality as well, pushing against the effigies' singular presences. 

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The erased, whose flitting visibility is central to my practice, is often dormant until triggered, flaring spectacularly as captured in my images of long extant effigies being consumed. 

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The result has been numerous extraordinary tableaus that have propelled the series far beyond its modest origins in my localized wanderings in walking distance from my long-term Brooklyn home and the plein-air drawings of neglected effigies that emerge as a result.

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The images I create, therefore, exist in a spectral space that is sufficed with indeterminacy. Spectral presences flitting in and out of visibility in pictures infused with melancholy, transgression, longing and perhaps menace.

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I translate myriad states of presence, non-presence, disappearance and reemergence into an avalanche of works on paper and paintings on canvas, often accompanied with text, that capture and reveal the moods, personal and collective, that define life in this extraordinary moment.

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