"The Life Cycle of the Common Baseball"

One day in the early spring, I took a walk around the edge of our local ballfield. The weeds and brush were beaten down from the snow. I spotted a lot of lost baseballs, ranging from almost new to totally hideless. When I arranged them on my shelf, I realized I was looking at the life stages of a typical baseball. I already had the mannequin hand and the souvenir bat on hand. When I put them all together, I knew had the makings of an assemblage. I built the stadium, and populated it with cutout heads from old magazines. I found the pennants and the cards on eBay. The copper that forms the side pillars came from a junkheap in the woods. I spent much of the spring and summer of 2006, creating and assembling the parts of this artwork.

"Greetings"

In 1978, I invited a few crayfish to dinner. Afterward, I saw in their shells a nightmarish vision of the mid-twentieth century. They symbolized the draft boards that sent so many friends and neighbors off to war. Inside the ancient cigarette tin, invisible without opening the box, is a slip of paper that says "Greetings".

"Loss of Grace"

This exhibit commemorates the moment in 1898, when plucky young Grace, the inventor's niece, stepped into the Mark II Excelsior Teleportation Device.

Grace was never seen again.

I built the entire cabinet in 1984. The inner parts include salvaged medical apparatus and a model of Grace that I sculpted in clay and cast in resin. An "infinity mirror" occupies the top half of the box. A small photo of a girl from roughly that era is caught between a mirror and one-way glass. She is illuminated by fiber optic cables. This is the only assemblage I've done that requires electricity.

"Hello Galaxy"

The wheel cover that I picked off the roadside already looked so much like a flying saucer, it didn't seem like a hard project. But several years went by, before I found just the right wheel cover for the bottom. I rescued Hello Kitty from the pavement behind the wheels of a semi-truck. When she consented to pilot the saucer, the other pieces came together rapidly.

"Atlantean Sun Deity Mask"

This carved wooden mask features hair and beard made of rope that I made from local wild plants. The teeth are calcite crystals.

"Intersection"

This art is an exploration of the intersection of thought and reality. This piece has been sold.