Infrastructure Development 101: SJ-C/85-86, 2008
16” x 8”
Mixed media and collage on wood

   Infrastructure Development 101 was developed as a way to test various approaches to a physically larger eight-part series more simply titled, Infrastructure Development. Both bodies of work are explorations of ways of representing timelines of events and relationships using highways and various other elements extracted from road maps. The path to this way of working stems at least as far back as my Splitting Ends series (1997) and more directly form the Transport series (1999). Upon embarking on the Infrastructure Development works about a year ago, I realized that I still had some technical aspects to work out, and decided to try to come up with a subject that would be somewhat conceptually relevant to test out some approaches. While ID will represent ten of the most significant relationships and events in my life, ID 101 depicts all the persons with whom I’ve had romantic connections to over my lifetime. The ID 101 works are all relatively small in scale (5” square to 14” x 30”) as opposed to the ID series which will all be three feet high by various widths up to seventeen feet. Both groups add to the string of autobiographical projects I have done as a way of entertaining a compulsion to express intimate feelings in an awkwardly revealing way while being able to take safe refuge behind chronological distance, abstraction, and metaphor.