It’s mystery I’m going for in my work.

I’m all in favor of mystery.  And that means not understanding completely what I’m doing too.  Everybody wants an answer. *I* want an answer. I want to know everything’s going to be okay.  I want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Everybody wants to know: When are you going to get done? How much? This, that… and we go through life like that. The interesting things, though, are the unexpected.  And they’re confounding. And it’s the same in art. But you’ve got to build that in. So that’s the trick. I have to do things that I’m not really sure of, where they go counter to some kind of line of thinking that I started off with.

So in Collection Point, it feels weird to paint on that concrete, to take community’s little drawings that they did, make them stencils, abstract them, and then to just paint them with a roller on this concrete. 

Not only that, but you’re not even able to see them all, because they’re obscured by each other and by the steel frame that holds them. And throughout the process, for the design team from building and various other folks, that was a big concern.  How are you going to represent everybody? How are you going to choose these? They’re not going to be able to be seen, all of them. Can we see all the images? How are you going to credit the people? Well, that’s not what I’m after at all. I just want the marks of the community, and if you can’t see the whole thing but you see part of it and you’re like, “What in the world, I don’t even understand, what are these things?”  Perfect. “But they’re covered! I can’t–” Great. That’s exactly the point. “What are those things? Are they hieroglyphics? Is that graffiti? I don’t know what it is. But there’s some kind of coherence to it. It’s on some of them, it’s not even on all of them, I don’t know what it is… What the heck is this thing?”

That’s the whole point. You want people to wonder.

Because then there’s a reason to keep looking.

collection point, Minneapolis