My mentor, Stephen Addiss, was a student and long-time friend of John Cage. When we were collaborating on our book stitching speechless, Steve pulled a copy of Cage’s 640 numbers between 1 and 4 out of a drawer in his kitchen, and said we should use it in some way. The copy was marked up—if I remember correctly, from a previous collaboration between the two.

I have kept the Cage piece for decades to use as a studio tool, when I want to introduce a particular type of chance methods into a piece, or if I want to consult Steve and Cage for their opinions.

More recently, I’ve begun making prints reproducing segments of Cage’s randomized sequence of numbers. I want to balance his faith in technology with my own commitment to the analog, since we are living in a world that is experiencing the consequences of unbridled technophilia.

Visual poem.

8” x 8”

Rubber-stamp type, burn marks, punched holes, collage, and aluminum foil on watercolor paper.

$30 (Sold)

Karmic Readings are visual poems based on an archive of printed matter I’ve amassed in the studio—old encyclopedias, magazines, auction catalogs, etc.—going back to the early 19th century. Some of the materials have deep personal meaning from my family’s history, while others are of more general interest.

I use chance methods to select little bits of text from the archive and place them together on the page to see what they might suggest to us. I believe that every bit of text contains the DNA of its time and place, and that we can learn about how the karmic engine of the world in our own time is operating from these surprising juxtapositions.

Here’s where the texts in this karmic reading come from:

Modern Real Estate Practices in Pennsylvania (5th ed.), ed. Herbert Bellairs, et al., Real Estate Education Co. (1989).

Reading for Fun for Boys and Girls in Elementary School, ed. Eloise Ramsey, National Council of Teachers of English (1937).

The American People, by David S. Muzzey, Ginn & Co. (1927).

The Poetical Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate, Harper & Brothers (1872)

Visual poem

5” x 7”

Sumi ink, rubber stamp, burn marks made with an incense stick, and text scraps from printed matter in our Karmic Readings Archive.

$20 / $30 matted to 8”x10”

sundown is a letterpress haiga, or haiku-painting.

Haiga traditionally combine a haiku and imagery into a singular, organic composition, with calligraphy and painting done with the same brush and sumi ink. I’ve incorporated letterpress into my haiga, along with assemblage and painted elements.

sundown

uh-oh

uh-oh

goes the crow

Visual poem

ed. of 10 copies, each with unique composition and some on different paper stocks, ranging from white to beige.

5” x 7”

Sumi ink, black linen thread, and hand-set letterpress printed on a tabletop 3×5 Kelsey Excelsior press.

$20

My brother and I became obsessed with surfing as teenagers, even though we lived a 4-hour drive from the beach. When we couldn’t be in the water, we obsessed over grainy, VHS surf videos and the day-glo surf magazines of the 1980s in our central Pennsylvania living room. After he died of cancer at the age of 25, I continued surfing as a way of staying close to him. Still, I’ve always lived in landlocked places, never less than 2 hours from the nearest waves.

Landlocked is a tribute to the power of surf photography and the delicious agony of being a landlocked surfer. Each image is a photo of a photo from a recent issue of The Surfer’s Journal, shot through a half-full, sweating pint glass that happens to be from our favorite surf shop in our “home” beach of Ocean City, Maryland.

As I took these photos in my living room in central North Carolina, I was flooded with the same stoke that filled two young brothers almost 40 years ago in a different, yet identical place.