I am interested in a comparison of private and public grieving. After considering the way Western cultures grieved in the past, especially in the Victorian era, I began to understand the need for rituals and visual markers of remembrance in a different way. My UNTITLED project delves into the ways grieving and remembrance can be illustrated by the individual via a communal visual history.

With the advent of the internet, people now construct histories, especially visual histories, easily. Images abound and can be edited and composed in ways that create narratives, sentence fragments, even history. These images can be composed to help illuminate important markers. I consider this UNTITLED project a constructed history of a personal kind of social grieving. Images accumulated through research for this project originate from the late 1960s and continue through the 1980's. This is roughly the time of my adolescence and early adulthood when I was trying to discover where I belonged in a time line that included the Gay Rights Movement, the "acceptance" of the LGBT community within the larger Western culture and the plague of AIDS.

Using various internet search engines and my digital camera, I spent, and continue to spend, many hours gathering pictures from archived video, stills, and photographs taken from my computer screen. I am intrigued by this process and the ways layer upon layer of reproduction, from uploaded content>computer screen>digital capture>artist reproductions, affect the formal quality of the pictures.

I am looking not only at the visual documentation of history available to me through surfing the web, but at ways to refer to my life and experiences through historical images from a shared visual culture. By using traditional materials: painting, embroidery, needlework, drawing, I contrast the contemporary pictorial language of the pictures (and our technologically aided memories of them) with a methodological reproduction (via handiwork), which together, form a meditation on the idea of permanence and remembrance.