Masked Communication

When I first started work on the Deep Space Communication show, I wanted to begin with early kinds of communication.  The first thing that came to mind was a mask.  The idea was that the sky is silent, yet we can see the clouds and stars and watch them move.  If one imagines that there are peoples looking down on us from that realm, then a visual communication makes sense.  Of course, as we stare into sky, it is our faces that appear as the points of life to the sky people.  Creating a mask and looking up made a lot of sense in that way.

In my works for this show I focused on two aspects of masked communication.  The first was a re-interpretation of the face which speaks to the wearer's internal space.  The  second was a display of the stories which the wearer shares with the sky.  One of the ideas which continues to intrigue me is the idea that the sky is a reflection of the world.  In a way, the sky is like a giant map which shows both places in space, but events in time.  The stories in the mask are a way to check the communication with the sky, "This is what I saw that you showed me".