“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

― Ralph Ellison, Living With Music: Jazz Writings

Untitled (Fort Klamath, Oregon), 2010

The Eillison quote is the best description I’ve read of what I’m trying to do. Rather than the blues, however,  my work looks more like toys. This series began with the idea of whirligigs or automata. The pieces partition my experience somewhat like the Case piece in the Stations series. Perhaps a day or a life is not a narrative sequence of different events, but consists of parallel actions each endlessly repeated according to its own mechanism. The mechanism of the linkage is the determinism of the material universe and the determinism of the unconscious mind. All the machines in this series move together in an environment and a story and a movie and an endless loop.