STATEMENT:

November 10, 2020.  Six a.m.  One week after the US presidential election and the sitting president is still causing chaos, insisting he won the election.  This, after all his lies and disruptive behavior during the past nine months of the COVID pandemic.  I am dumbfounded.  Almost absent-mindedly I go to my refrigerator, open it, and see some kale I had forgotten to cook.  It was stressed and depleted.  I was stressed.  I was depleted.  Not having the words to make sense of my condition, I photograph the kale, which, it seemed to me, symbolized not only my thoughts and feelings but also the state of the nation.

The images fascinated me.  I found that arranging the  kale and other decaying vegetables on solid color backgrounds gave me a way to see slow erosion in action. The result was oxymoronic: beautiful and ugly.  An edgy irony. I continued making these pictures, documenting my condition and that of the nation.

Enervate, then, is my response to the politics of that time. With the current mean-spirited and vindictive US presidential administration, Enervate is, painfully, once again relevant.