“UPROOTED”

Cut paper installation on Colonel’s Row for Portal, Governor’s Island, 2019

The visual languages of the stairway installation, “Uprooted”, were initially inspired by new information about the way trees communicate through root systems. Variations on the theme grew to encompass considerations of the displacements and upheavals increasingly happening in our world, effecting our ecology. None of this is depicted in a literal way, however, but were translated through the process of gestural papercutting and free-association, effecting the evolution of the surreal, biomorphic forms and patterns that comprise this expressionist installation. As the work came together I responded more and more to the idiosyncrasies of the historic space on Colonel’s Row on Governor’s Island and the way I could create a dialogue between past and present through the presence of anthropomorphic sculptural forms. Recalling, the Merzbau, a seminal work by Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, started in his home in 1927 and thought to be an early form of installation art, I realized how fitting it was to create a work that would take over what was at one point a place in which people lived full lives, but that has transformed over and over in time in fascinating new incarnations, ones it’s original residents would likely have not have imagined.