Quilting for Dental Professionals

In this series, I work in a variety of mediums: old photographs, paint, pencil and vintage ephemera. Commercial and technical imagery from the 1950’s show unvarnished representations of periodontal disease and malocclusion or depict the harsh reality of factory work during the postwar era.  I layer these with vintage cartoons to create a stark counterpoint-childhood is rarely untroubled. 

I create a narrative thread by arranging these elements in a grid or patchwork of darkness and light.  The work is a roadmap of disparate elements coalescing to a sensible whole.  Connections and relations among the many layered parts bring the fearsome conditions surrounding us into focus.

I describe a hidden world where the innocence of storytime collides with the decrepitude of tooth decay and the barbarism of the factory floor. Dental photography speaks to intimacy, what is private but barely out of view.  Machine work offers nothing but the bleak truth of task completion while storybooks paint the glory of innocence lost in imagination and fantasy.  I combine these themes in a way that reveals the discongruity of revering innocence while offering so much opportunity for its ruin; the predicament of innocence is to survive despite conditions where its nonexistence seems assured.