St Kat

1989

This was my first collage that wasn’t related to Vegas.

Most of this image is drawn from an early Twentieth Century hand-made French postcard. It had three-dimensional elements glued onto its surface. I tried to locate the photographer who shot the ad from which I drew the model I used as St Kat. I would have enjoyed presenting to him what I had made of his shot. I spent hours in long distance phone calls, from retail outlets to a product manufacturer to the ad house that had created the old ad. It was hopeless.

Chorale

1990

Could a collage that contain within it the power of these individual images, or would the power of the single images cause the collage to explode, and fail? I made elaborate efforts to contact the photographer Ethan Hoffman, whose work was the source of my challenge, to ask his opinion of my effort. I was informed he had recently died.

("Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul", by Ethan Hoffman.)

Chorale central element

1990

Design Build

1991

The Maw of Industry

1991

I had great difficulty finding a hand configured as I needed it to be for this piece. I settled for a detail of a statue by Canova. For his own purposes, he had distorted the length of the fingers in the hand. I'm guessing that Canova's distorted hand was designed to be viewed from a perspective in which the distortion made the hand look more naturally modeled.

The Perilous Edge 1491

1991

Since the beginning of history, people have tried to visualize what happens at the edge of the world, the point of transition to the void. This is where collage occurs, at such points of transition.

The Birth of Europe

1992

Are turtles and rabbits common in our neighborhood? Then perhaps a first conflict between them is the source of the cosmos. Cosmologies are extrapolations; available evidence used to infer what we cannot see.

After Poussin

1993

In the search for angels' wings for this picture, I scanned the bird sections of most of the libraries in Vegas; UNLV, UNLV Architectural Library, Flamingo, Summerlin, Sunset, CCSD, and the LV City Library.

Berries

1993

Luis Marden is the photographer of the central portrait.

The Nape

1994

Some of these pictures were designed as 70mm film images, with so much detail they would be best seen if the image was printed on billboards. "Lace" was designed as a CD jewel box image, a 4" wide image designed to catch an eye from ten feet away.

Infometrics

1994

This image was another one intended to be a CD cover, to be easily read from a good distance away.

Climate Change

1994