Several years ago, a friend described a meeting he had witnessed in Poland, during the Perestroika era. As film and equipment were hard to come by, filmmakers would meet and take turns reading screenplays and describing camera shots that they would take if they had the necessary materials. These meetings served as a way to continue and sustain their imaginations in times of profound disarray.
What interests me about this anecdote is how the imagined and the real are bound together out of necessity. The imagined and the real, mind and material, sacred and profane, sublime and ballast: each is a placekeeper for the absence of the other.
Making an idea “real”—in my case, creating sculpture, photography, and performance—I imagine the kind of interior and exterior landscape in which the object exists. How it is seen is central to the work. I see the “real” as stand-in for human experience, whether a performance or a photograph, whether a shoe or a figure, whether in a meadow or in a room. It is this desire to hold on to the transitory which directs my imagined and real life.