Apropos Eye Flower

Eye Flower began with the recognition of a likeness between two human organs, the eye and vulva, each an entrance into the human body. This pairing arose from a sense of the act of seeing as a blossoming. I flower. Here, I equals eye, as though a rebus, aligned opposite the hidden flower of the feminine. Here the ‘flower’ becomes an ersatz second eye, thus forming an eros of binocular vision, uniting the window to the soul and the entrance to the world. One manifests visibility, while the other suggests, among many things, invisibility. Both images are ‘part-objects’ which evoke the ungraspability of the other, the orifice as oracle, scopophilia and reproduction. The vertical and horizontal brought together as an existential plus sign. Seeing flowers, a Georgia O’Keefe in reverse.

These are books which look back at the viewer. The images are rendered in the ‘antique’ vernacular of drawing, catalogued somewhere between a medical sketchbook and a diary with its aura of privacy, secrecy. Some of the drawings derive from photographs, some from life and some strictly from the imagination. Cliché on the one hand, taboo on the other, an apparent contradiction which I think, creates a ‘quiver’ effect, caused by a collision between the banal and the strange.

These subjects are defined in a sense by their edges; lip and lid. Edges like borders, are locations where the body and the world meet, places of entry or escape, where sovereign states ‘kiss’, a space between the seen and the ‘obscene’, akin to blinking, moving between being open and closed. This ‘between’ is the subject of Eye Flower.