Federal Hill

My work features Rhode Island iconography to express a personal connection to my home state and its industrial, maritime, and coastal heritages. To add both humor and drama to these narrative prints impending storms threaten fragile, unaware characters in their colorful scenes. Over the past few years I have admired many of the Japanese printmakers who created visual accounts of their country firmly set in the time in which they lived, but that also have remained timeless for generations. For instance, Hiroshige\u27s Fireworks over Ryogoku Bridge 1856-58 pictures images of Edo that are all but disappeared, living only in the dreams of present day Tokyo. I recognize these dreams developing for a Rhode Island that has passed, or possibly never existed as I remember it, often because the coastline itself is in a constant state of transition. The works in No Floats compliment and continue the path of my previous exhibition, A Curious Tide, at Cade Tompkins Projects in Providence, RI (May 8-July 31, 2015). Recent projects include Leave Your Troubles Behind (on view), Later that Day at Second Beach (on view), The Sinking of Matunuck, and Zeppelin. These works are a visual accounting of the houses, shacks, trailers, bars, markets and coastlines in the present day and the past, and they address both community order and degradation. An element these prints share is the depiction of what the locales of New Shoreham, Middletown, Matunuck Village, and Narragansett may look like after the ocean claims the land, by using bright screen printing ink overlaid on the intaglio rendered landscape. The execution of the large etching and screen print, Pouring on Jamestown (on view), was made possible by a Visual Arts Sea Grant from the University of Rhode Island. The purpose of this project was to create a large-scale print of Conanicut Island in Narragansett Bay that captured the island\u27s vulnerability to the sea and stonns. The panoramic view of the eastern side of the island was etched using a single copper plate that spans five feet wide and three feet tall. This etching layer was printed on the monumental printing press at the AS220 Community Prints hop in Providence. With a ten-foot press bed. it is one of the largest presses of its kind in the United States. and professional assistance was provided by Lois Harada. Simon Slowinski, and Brian Whitney. Special thanks to Dan \\food for sharing a panoramic vie \u27 of Conanicut Island (c.l920) on which the print is based and to die Jamestown Historical Society for providing assistance and digital files for reference.https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/as220_root/3329/thumbnail.jp