It was only after I had dismounted my installation at Installation Space in North Adams, MA that its owner informed her followers that the gallery was closing. Instead the space would be used as a revolving entity to bring visiting artists and the local arts community together.

My work was chosen for the last show before the context for the space changed. I feel fortunate that that was the case. For the installation I created took collectively five years to put together, even though I did not know that parts of it would ever be included.

The tenacity and intensity with which I approached making one-hundred-thirty drawings that became the remainder of the show was completely unintentional. I did not know how I would make sense of them until it was time to consolidate an idea into a proposal that eventually led to its acceptance. I realized that the work I had been doing intuitively became a metaphor for the transition from living in the country to living in a nearby city. I was doing during the pandemic the opposite of what everyone else was doing, moving from the city to the country. That migration contributed to the sale of my house.

This is the statement that eventually became a guide for the actual installation; a print of it was mounted on the wall at the entrance to the exhibit:

Syntactical Shifts portrays the development in my artistic language discovered throughout the first year of working in my new studio after I moved to North Adams in March of 2021.

The parts of trees inside the window cases are parts of a sculpture I made at my former studio in Worthington, MA. It fell apart after I left it outdoors to test its stamina. I have used the parts as the subject matter for the photographs and the resulting photo/scans/drawing combinations in this installation.

Inside the gallery, the hanging sculptures and wrapped tree branches were also made in my former studio. I did not leave them in the places where they should have decayed. I will never again remove any part of the natural environment into my studio to change into some form other than the one that is meant to decompose. I took photographs of the parts of these sculptures and reduced them to the highest contrast and most minimal images possible. These images function as the language elements on one of the scrolls in the back of the gallery as described below.

The centerpiece of each of the large drawings are photographs taken in North Adams. As you enter the gallery, the drawing on the left is based on a photograph I took looking up at a tree on Cherry Street, and the drawing on the right is based on a photograph of an array of branches (seen in the window) spread haphazardly on my drawing table. These two drawings are formulated on both the kind of imagery and layout that might be seen in Oriental screen paintings.

The scrolls at the back of the gallery imitate how calligraphy tells a story in Oriental screens from the right to the left. I traced the images, described above, onto the paper and colored in the shapes black.  No plan of sequence exists in them, only the one that unfolds through my intuitive choices of what shape comes next. The faux velvet-wrapped lengths of wood on the floor connecting the two scrolls are a metaphor for a bridge between the changes in the graphic characters from the scroll on the left to the scroll on the right across the room.

The scroll on the floor placed beneath the hanging branch sculptures was drawn to imitate a mycelium network beneath a forest floor which allows for communication and nutritional delivery amongst trees. The images in frames laid on top of the scroll are made of printed scans of the framed horizontal drawings on the gallery walls onto which I drew extensions of the branches in ink. The faux velvet-wrapped branches placed on the very top are intended to emphasize the extensions of the aforementioned drawn branches.

The entire installation is designed to codify the psychological overtones of dealing with the trauma of moving away from my home of forty-two years, making sense of an urban world, and restoring peace to my life. Every drawing represents the assimilation of past experience, creating new image forms and perceiving them in as many ways possible to finish in a flourish of leaving behind, “branching out,” and walking away from the past into a present “line” of thinking.

Below is a sequential photographic view of the installation in accordance with the statement, starting with pictures of the storefront windows before entering the gallery, concluding with a video that engages the center of the installation looking up at the hanging sculptures and then circling around down to the floor scroll in one motion, the next motion being leaving the gallery.

Please start at the bottom of video to see it entirely.