2.

The stimulus for the Orchid-Bat series originated from bats’ physical abilities to resemble the plants around them as a camouflage technique and from the way orchids can become more visually similar to the animals that eat their nectar in order to seduce them into pollinating.

My ideas take form in sculptural reliefs and oil paintings depicting beautifully visceral, unsettling entities, creating a tension between seductively blossoming creatures, primal sexuality and grotesqueness. These brightly colored works, which in many cases reference forms of the human anatomy, infuse the images with a dynamic energy on both formal and psychological levels. Through my work, I investigate my role as the artist as creator and Creation as metaphor.

This body of work aims to explore the heightened intensity of polymorphous sensation. I consider my work to be a form of postmodern mannerism, which combines perversity, acute exaggeration, compression of space, extreme color and metamorphosis. Through the creation of the Orchid-Bat hybrid, in which the impossible is achieved, I invite viewers to experience the highly charged states of fornication between plant and animal, sculptural and painted, rough and smooth, precious and feared, seductive and grotesque.

IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS:
1. Orchid-Bat (Tree of LIfe)
2006
glazed & goldplated earthenware
on painted 14 X 10 foot rectangle

2. DETAIL
Orchid-Bat (Tree of LIfe)

3. Orchid-Bat (violet)
2006
glazed earthenware
26 X 28 X 6″

3.

IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS:
4. Orchid-Bat (light)
2006
glazed earthenware
11 x 10 x 7″

5. Orchid-Bat (petals)
2005
glazed earthenware
26 X 23 X 4″

6. Orchid-Bat (red)
2006
oil on frosted plexiglass
19 X 13″