Impartial Witness

“The writer,” wrote Anton Chekov, “should not be a judge of his characters or what they say, but an impartial witness....It's time...to realize...that in fact nothing can be understood in this world.” Writers, Chekov contended, serve both themselves and their readers by simply observing, creating and reporting. This body of work, consisting of thirty-six diptychs and four triptychs, is an effort to apply his maxim through visual means and to express and describe the ways in which we come to terms with what is unknowable in our world, the ways in which we come to terms with the paradox of feeling not at home in the world.

Found magazine images, altered with gouache, and original gouache and graphite pencil drawings are paired together. The eighty-four pieces are meant to be seen as a unit, as an installation. As well as having a relationship to the collective work, each diptych and triptych has its own distinct relationship, which is present but not explicit. Each, too, is given the title of a city park in which I have spent time. The images are not necessarily tangibly related to the park under which they are assigned, but they belong to them in a metaphysical sense. Parks were chosen because they possess the unique quality of being both of a particular place but also places entirely their own; they are places in which we seek out refuge and solace, places of contemplation in which we take time to stop and step out of our lives. Parks, too, serve as a metaphor for the larger world: boundaried and defined, we consider them wild and natural, yet we shape and cultivate them to suit our desires; we label every tree and every body of water in a subconscious attempt to reach ultimate truth and ultimate understanding and to say, “yes, here I am in this place, I see everything now.”