These pieces run across the floor and up the wall, so that when the viewer stands on the “feet” of these pieces their shadow is cast.  The shadows, cut from black felt are approximately 8-10 feet tall.  They are looming and comical. 

 

Real shadows reveal that which is real, but these control and mock the viewer by fictionalizing a basic form, much like a fun house mirror.  Initially the flat, black, cartoon-like forms are whimsical and seemingly benign.  They turn darker as the viewers must relate these figures to themselves.

 

Cast shadows physically reflect what is real; the goal of these fictitious shadows is to pull from the viewer an interior reality.  These pieces, cut from large rolls of black felt, run from under the viewer’s feet and up the wall.  They average ten feet tall in order to loom over their source. 

 

While the reference to 18th century silhouette portraiture is clear—as in the work of Kara Walker and Noble and Webster—of higher significance is Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy, in which the figures’ exterior actions are radically different from their interior emotional worlds.  The cartoon-like rendering of these shadows allows a safe access to images that are, on second consideration, somber, poignant and subtly severe.

 

As a friend once said to me, “there are days when I feel like a hammer; then everything looks like a nail.”  That is funny and it is not.  It is human.