A formative early visual experience was my encounter with the familiar pedagogical tool of the diorama used as historical illustration or prop to social science. As a child I imaginatively located “history” and “science” in the construction of the diorama itself, and in some sense my visual work develops from this initial misprision. This ongoing fascination with the literal construction of history and its devices – the display case, the vitrine, the manuscript file, the card catalog, etc. – continues into the present, in my work as an archivist. Another large influence on my work is my engagement in an ongoing dialogue with poets, working as a visual artist in a community of writers for over 15 years. This experience has been especially important to me over the past nine years, during which I have lived in the Bay Area and found challenge and response to my work in the writing of poets including Dodie Bellamy, Norma Cole, kari edwards, Rob Halpern, Kevin Killian, Laura Moriarty, Yedda Morrison, and Jocelyn Saidenberg. I have also written scholarly articles on redevelopment and community organization, another site of loss and erasure.

My art practice has increasingly come to site itself in the gaps and fissures of archival practice itself, the traumas that a positive practice of documentary history forgets or represses. The tendency of fixative tape to lift text off newsprint, the erosion of paper into texture and fiber, the attenuation of context around the fragment – where archival practice must approach these as problems to be solved, my assemblages and works on canvas treat them as a condition of possibility.

In earlier collages the found fragment, an “overheard” integer of evidence, enters whole into a logic of placement and layering, referencing "history" as an assemblage of positive object-facts: postcards, stamps, grocery lists, snapshots, and letters. This work lies somewhere between the backrooms of special collections and the gutters and demolition sites of urban archaeology. Developed largely in response to the historical landscape of Buffalo, NY, an approach to the contemporary ruin is at its center.

The more recent pieces, by contrast, begin to offer what Rob Halpern characterizes as “a negative imprint of the archive.” Halpern continues: “This work struggles with history's underside, where what remains legible is but a trace of material abrasion, a scar of illegible social force. What appears is a residue of "meaning" after our own processes of "cultural cleansing" (however euphemized by the rhetoric of the posterity) reduce lived stories to a few barely legible scrapes, and stray utterance. Textured material, and color – all that is visible to the senses – occupies the vast blank of historical erasure.”