I call myself a painter, although much of my process actually entails cutting, tearing, arranging, pasting and printing. Paper serves as my primary material. Over the years, I have collected a wide assortment of images and scraps that I find both loaded with meaning and visually compelling. My archive includes everything from finger paintings made by children, to chopstick wrappers, to prints of my favorite Old Master paintings. There are snapshots and photocopies, postcards and pages ripped from magazines. This eclectic collection serves as both inspiration, as well as actual material for my collages. As these found images and documents appear in new contexts, two potentially contradictory processes take place. First, the original message of the image is redirected. For example, by cutting up my own spontaneously made abstract gesture paintings and recontextualing them in a slower paced collage, I’ve changed the original intent of the paintings and hence destabilized their meaning. The second process involves highlighting what I consider to be the “aura” of the found object, even though the materials that I use are often reproduced. In fact, to use Benjamin’s vocabulary, it is as if I am sensing the aura in these found objects—both the content and history of the image play a part here- and imbuing it with a unique presence that can be perceived by the viewer. The result straddles a line between harmony and dissonance. This transformative tension, driving my current concerns as an artist, bears a resemblance to alchemy.