My earliest artwork was inspired by African and Haitian art. In the early 90s, I couldn’t afford to buy the works that spoke to me… so I began making my own versions of it. I loved the work and eventually there was so much of it I began showing and selling the work.
The work most respected in most African cultures is that which works within tradition while bringing something innovative and fresh to the piece. I feel I can say that I worked in that spirit— I studied obsessively, reading everything I could get my hands on and observing and handling authentic work in galleries and private collections.
My two proudest moments at that time were when I was asked to remove a sculpture from Beloved, a gallery and hoodoo shop in Wicker Park because it scared the tourists from the suburbs too much, and the day my work was used in ritual.
The Ghede Libation Bottle at left was used by by Haitian houngan, Saveur St. Cyr during ritual trance while visiting Chicago. He chose it from among the thirty-odd traditional bottles on Marilyn Houlberg’s altar. I was fortunate to move in next to her when I lived in Chicago as she was one of the foremost experts in African and Haitian art worldwide. We became close friends and she bought a lot of my best early work. She was also a mentor and guide I could go to when I needed really specific information.
Two ideas from this period remain at the core of the work I do now, despite the fact that these ideas have taken me in what appears to be a very different direction.
The first idea is that of encoding meaning in the choice of material, which comes from my study of Bakongo minkisi. The active magical ingredients of minkisi sculptures are often chosen because their visual appearance suggests a desired effect, or because the name of an ingredient (such as lubizu, a grain) suggests through rhyme or pun the desired outcome (zibula, that it may open). The best example of this idea in my own work is The Great Bowl O’ Fire— using a torch to cut flame images into a flammable gas storage tank to create a firebowl which can then be plumbed for gas is a perfect example of how I like materials and ideas to work together.
The second idea is something Robert Farris Thompson alludes to in the essay Rhythmized Textiles in his book Flash of the Spirit. He compares the staggered patterns of Mande textiles and of crazy quilts from the American South to the “off-beat phasing of melodic accents in African and African Amercian music.” That comparison changed everything about the way I work.
In Western art, we typically only consider something to be a pattern when it repeats predictably, like a checkerboard or a picket fence. The idea of a visual pattern as improvisational, erratic and vibrant as a jazz solo seems an entirely different thing, an expression of chaos.
But pattern is structure and structure is not always symmetrical. All one need do is look at the world to see constant examples of non-repeating patterns which are nevertheless rhythmic, dynamic and constant: the troughs and peaks of waves, the topology of a region (and it’s relation to the layout of cities, watersheds, or the distribution of flora and fauna), the paths of migratory birds or patterns of urban decay. From my City Gates which used an accurate street map as a pattern for ironwork, to my Dance sculptures, to my scrap metal abstract fences, all of them are based on this idea of visual pattern based on musical melody and rhythm.
