Artist's Statement

The act of losing myself in the urban decay is essential to my artistic process: I roam, as a truant would, between the worn-down walls of the unkempt underworld of the city. I search dark corners of back alleys for the echoes of natural processes that relate to human experience. The visual encounter triggers a sense of place vis-à-vis philosophical inquiries; it charges me with a creative momentum that is filtered and distilled once in my studio. Wherever I roam, I pick up objects that catch my eye or please my aesthetic sensibilities, as artifacts of my journeys -pieces of wood from abandoned furniture, pieces of metal from mechanisms or tools and fragments of paper with markings of these forgotten locations, as well as photographic documentation for further visualization.

My recent work is a culmination of experiments about relationships between constructed boxes, using transformed found materials, and prints depicting images of architectural elements, i.e. doors and windows from the cityscape. This juxtaposition relies on a dichotomy between real three-dimensional spaces and projected two-dimensional ones, blurring the delineation between inside and outside and infusing a sense of location and memory into the pieces. Built as quasi-miniatures, the viewer needs to closely peer inside the boxes to visually interact with their scale and the objects contained within them. This causes a shift in one’s own relationship to space and pulls the viewer as a participant in a new, more psychologically loaded one, where the subconscious roams in an expansive, multi-leveled world.

Most recently, I have become involved in the production of miniaturized objects from everyday life in the city, like garbage bags, park benches and scaled-down buildings constructed from their actual materials. From the standpoint of a recycler, I grab what is defunct or basically, dead by proxy of being abandoned, and, through natural processes I re-animate it, giving it a role as part of something real. From the standpoint of an image-maker, I desire to realistically re-create and re-mind the viewer, through an adapted form of painting, about how nature and time affect the city around us and, by proxy, the people who inhabit it. As Lewis Mumford explains in The City in History, the city is “a product of earth … a fact of nature … man's method of expression.” The city reflects our activities and our energies; it acts like a temple in constant flux. Using this energy towards a transformative end allows me to fuse my artistic objectives with my personal sense of responsibility as a citizen, not only of Montreal, but of a planet which needs to re-construct its values and sense of place in the 21st century.