The next three images in the series are posted now.   I will not say much more about them until I finish the series...except that the sentence in the border (wingdings font) is different for the second three images compared to the first three.

This will just be a short blog entry…I have started a new series called My Secret Decoder Ring and posted the first three images which are entitled, Lemon Sharpie, The Big White Mint, and That’s a Gluten!  The series is meant to further explore the concepts of playfulness and/or seriousness.  The images are all 1-foot squares depicting a tile from my kitchen floor with either food or water on it, in one form or another.  Other subject matter, specifically plants found in my house, are superimposed upon the image.  This is done in a way to create a rough radial symmetry, kind of like a Mandala. However, in the end they are also somewhat decorative in the way that floor tiles are, but with absurd subjects on them.  I think of the titles as I work through all the issues that evolve in resolving the image.  By the time I am done, the entire series will build up to something bigger.  The title of the Series (My Secret Decoder Ring) relates to the text that I have placed in the grouting-border that is around each tile.  I have used the Wingdings font, so…unless you can read wingdings you will probably need to decode it letter by letter.  

Several decades ago, most of my work was about games.  In those days I painted a lot more.  Not only did I make images of chess pieces but also, I created paintings with themes based on Monopoly, Risk, and even one about a game from the ancient world that doesn’t exist anymore.  Eventually I stopped doing this because, while I rationalized the work as being about play, I came to realize that a lot of it was really about games.  With the exception of a few interactive images the work was not all that playful.  At that point, I took a sharp turn towards trying to make images that are playful, and sometimes even a little humorous, among other things.

While doing some research for an image a few weeks ago, I noticed that there are a number of web sites that provide information and templates on how to create your own design for a Monopoly game. This reminded me of a painting I once made of a chess board upon which you could actually play chess…complete with little chess pieces that could be moved around the painting.  In that spirit, I decided to make my own monopoly board and I have titled it, “Composition No.1: Dirty Money.”  

​This image is like the Monopoly game board in that there is a lot of interesting stuff within the boarder of the piece, including: coins, gloves, soapy water, and paper.  On the other hand, the inside is a massive composite image of an arial view of a dirty sink-scape populated by a township of monopoly houses. In this way I hope to confuse the viewer as to which part of the image is more important…the inside or the outside. Of course, this goes with some of the things I have already mentioned about binaries as well as my recent interest in houses and doors.  This image ties together a variety of subjects such as: rubber gloves, borders, games, water, coins, dirt, and even my earlier preoccupation with making interactive and playable art. This all seemed monumental so, with a polite nod to Wassily Kandinsky, I decided to include the word “Composition” in the title…just as he did for his monumental pieces.  Or, maybe it just struck me a funny to do so.

The image I posted today is called “Two Sides Away From My Front Door.”  I started conceptualizing this Image while I was working on “The War Against Inside/Outside: A Documentary,” which also involved a number of photographs of doors.  As I thought about doors, I considered some of the ways they are important in our current place and time.  As I mentioned in a previous blog post, entering and exiting buildings now involves changes in personal protective equipment and hygene. Further to that, a lot of us are spending a lot more of our time in our own house, for better or for worse.   Therefore, our own front doors are gaining new significance.  
To that end, I began considering the way in which my door is both on the inside and the outside of my house.  When I consider my door, I do so from the place where I am at the time.  When I am inside my house, the door is on the inside and when I am outside my house the door is on outside.  As I’ve mentioned before I am interested in binaries…that is, things that are supposedly one way or the other. But maybe many binaries are like doors and what they are has more to do with our own perspective.  
To explore this concept visually, I photographed my front door from the inside and the outside, lined the images up in Photoshop, and layered them with the “subtraction” mode.  The result was an instant mix of the two photographs, which I did not plan.  In this way I have again abdicated myself of some of the control over the image.  When I introduce chance like this, it is not to sublimate the unconscious, as the Surrealists would have. I use chance to deliberately distance myself from responsibility for the image, in a playful and possibly ironic manner that contrasts with the bulk of my image making practices, which involve a lot of control over the process.  Finally, I included the inside/outside coin.  Coins have a built-in binary (heads or tails) but this one also relates the image of the door to issues regarding our current time and place.