I just finished up a residency with Gaia in Hoboken NJ and a six week group show at Mana Fine Arts. The project was called A Season of Healing, and here is part of the text from the artist talk. I am currently reshooting the images and creating new configurations, but I will have the actual plaques I used for the show photographed and put up later.

.A Season of Healing is inkjet prints mounted on wooden plaques, and covered with up to 5 layers of shellac. The top row of images shows the phenomena of trees growing around an intrusive object. The bottom row is divided between male and female body parts mimicking roughly the images above.

Stations of the Cross:
The text was taken and cut-up from text I found online. It had that overt, passionate Harlequin romance quality to it, which I found kitschy. But it also was also reinforcing this idea of eroticism and death. The Virgin Mary’s voice is used to describe the scene taking place, and we are to empathize with her suffering, but also her weird excitation at the martyrdom of her son. This seems to be a very Catholic theme, a wallowing in excess and extremes and finding relationships between opposites. Such as the extreme guilt over sex and issues of the body, but then an acceptance of mystical experiences, religious fervor, and ecstasy of both body and mind such as we see in the saints.
I was just making this hypocrisy a bit more obvious by cutting up the text to emphasize the sexual nature of what was being said.

Trees and the resilience of nature:

The ultimate mother of God I suppose is Mother Nature, the universal laws that govern us all. I find the phenomenon of trees healing, overtaking, engulfing a foreign object quite fascinating. How the healed over area looks like flesh, how there seems to be an impaling quality, almost sexual sometimes. Who is winning, is there a struggle even, or is the tree turning an obstruction into a false symbiotic relationship. A kind of forced conjoined twin, which the tree being the one who can grow will overcome, engulfing the obstruction completely.
I was thinking how organized religion acts like an obstruction to natural law sometimes. It stands in the way to progress, creating a barrier to fully realizing our natures, our desires, and our deaths even. But in the end, nature will always have the final say, we give into carnal lust, we drink, we fall in love and are passionate, and we die and rot, nature engulfs us.