This body of work is a portrait of the social phenomena of homelessness in America.
I have worked with dramatizing the conditions of the unsheltered because the power of art to make people see the unknowable, care and connect to lives, is sacred and necessary. I have also created a miniature encampment the scale of a doll’s house, at first innocent and charming, yet upon closer inspection, the horror emerges of living in the elements, scourging for meals or safety.
All proceeds of “Invisible Time” and “Barbaric Times” are donated to The Coalition of Homelessness & BOSS Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency.
Invisible Life
One of the most common objects of our time is the everlasting and ubiquitous plastic bag.
Vagrant bags tangle in trees, clutter our lives while our shopping bags fill with more plastic bags and we worry about clogging the air and the sea with so much everyday junk. There is an astringent parallel between our blind consumerism and the people who float around with no place to go that we pass when leaving the market. The homeless encampments grow in my city with alarming neglect. The plastic bags proliferate in direct proportion to the perennial unsheltered human reality, both in a never-ending spiral of a sordid down-cycling. The bags and the people are both visible and invisible, existing in their bubbles, living a chaotic unacknowledged life, one which society seems incapable of seeing.
I have developed a process to merge images of homeless encampments with the banal good cheer of the plastic shopping bag. Thank you for your purchase or Have a Nice Day is cheapened by the black and white image of marginalization. The pieces work as individuals and as a chorus.
