I was three days from being seven when the towers fell. All I remember of the six o’clock news report was my preoccupation with a long, sturdy cardboard tube I had fashioned as a pole-vault and didgeridoo. The fall, the city, the dust, the erasure of the vertical; those images cemented later. I did not understand (the) gravity then.

Four years ago I found personal photographs from this time wedged in the spare-tire well of a car that was once mine. They were few of many that had been transported years prior, with the intention of references for paintings. Lost to slippage from a clear-file: a personal failing. Stuck with moisture they tarnished, bled, and faded.

I found them again — I do not remember where — and carefully slid them in a new clear-file. I transported them here: perhaps last year.

I found them — for a third time — this August These photographs which I never should have taken from the safety of my mother’s photo-albums. Images pre-selected by iterations of my past-self; reselected in the present by me now. They haunt me: a retaining of the discarded, a fading and wearing away...a deconstruction of the sacred.

I, too, am refashioned from the pieces.

I, at times, feel unusable and nonfunctional. The works in this show are readdressed unfinished or abandoned paintings. The original lost to layers of new imagery; barely a compositional or coloristic start-point. No remnants remain, bar the odd smear of mismatched paint or tack of a masking-tape label on their rear-sides.

A reuse of failures and abandonments.

A reclaiming: A new life.

My interpretation of self, the physical supports, and depicted imagery coalesce in concept: The Refashioning.

A portrait is not the collective whole self, but rather a fleeting moment. I am not who I will become and I am not who I have been. The ‘me’ — the portrait that I know — is internal. It is in the images I absorb, the understandings I build, the things that I am drawn to, and how these elements entwine. Like towers, totems, trees, and verticality itself: it is not fixed. I am not impervious. I look to the rearview and drive on anyway.