Since I can remember, I have been interested in the reproduction of systems, particularly in the critical or sensitive moments in which the systems pivot, alter or mutate. This inquiry has taken on many forms; at times political, perceptual, introspective, figurative, literal, linguistic, cultural, visual. On the whole I don't believe that my work is political, yet a geo-historical view is present everywhere, whether it be biological or extremely personal: In the unfolding Earth in swift nude _____, in singing and seeing the unforeseeable in Great Balls of Fire, in flight, fear and irony at a bus stop where nothing seems to happen in Dayton, Ohio Bus Stop, or in the voice of a young Chinese American boy who is trying to figure out who are his mother's parents and who are his father's. It is embedded in my interest in national boundaries, my study of the formation of thoughts and memories, in my interest in ancient city walls, laws, locks, chains, architectural spaces, marriages, promises, names and definitions.
I envision and capture a world as it exists in motion, something whose deepest meanings cannot be found through explanation, definition, fixed categorization.
Instead of saying more, I'll leave you with a hint, something that occurred to me one day walking down the street in East London after someone had asked me to put Great Balls of Fire in the context of my work.
I believe insight can be found here.
London
By William Blake
I wander through every chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness marks of woe.
In every cry of every man
In every infant's cry of fear
In every voice in every ban
The mind forged manacles I hear.
How the chimney sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appalls
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the newborn infant's tear
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
Influences: my wife Areli Barrera de Grodski, the Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, David Solow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Shirin Neshat, Frederick Douglass, Martin Heidegger, Christoph Schmitz-Scholemann, friends and family, The English Patient, Rodney Graham, Shakespeare, living in Paris, Cologne, Cherokee, NYC and on the road...
