Transplant

 “I’m traveling back and forth to help my sick father and I spend a lot of time on airplanes. I lived in Ohio for 24 years. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 18 years, it’s catching up. What I see through a viewfinder, through a lens, bounced off a mirror, a sensor, through misted glass…these frames and filters move my eye, my brain, further from the thing I see: shrouding, splintering, filtering, obfuscating, multiplying, blurring. It’s neither here nor there, moving or fixed. A prism.” -Sketchbook, 2015

The painting series “Transplant” is based on a number of trips to my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio in 2015. My father, fixed in the location of my youth, was awaiting a heart transplant, while I, a “transplant” to Southern California, traversed the continent in order to assist my family. During this time, my father was confined to a windowless room in a cardiac ICU. I started taking photographs of my trips back and forth, my neighborhood in Los Angeles, and my sister’s home in Ohio, so that he could see what was happening outside his tiny, sterile room. These photographs became the basis for “Transplant”. There are different kinds of disasters in life; epic ecological events with global reach that have occupied much of my work over the last ten years, and more intimate, personal disasters like a family crisis. In “Transplant” I have sought to balance my regional, personal experience within the larger, more political concerns of my work as a whole.