Collaborative in nature, my current project, Crossing, explores additive and subtractive stone lithography printing with animation to depict the topography of Southeastern Herzegovina province in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the place of my birth. The visual vocabulary in this series of singular images, once applied to the animated film, takes on the crude, almost clumsy appearance of early black and white cinema, complete with simple gestures and didactic narratives. In the film, I invoke the feeling present in classic paintings such as Frederic Edwin Church’s Iceberg Flotante, Caspar David Friedrich’s Sea of Ice, Edvard Munch’s Sommernacht am Strand, and Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream. Simple, eloquent transitions from image to image, such as an iceberg gradually morphing into a cloud, or a stormy, rain-filled cloud evaporating into nothing, create a familiar, yet unsettling experience. I see the hybrid blend of drawing, print, and animation as creating an amalgam of possibilities, in which the unfamiliar becomes almost tactile, while the familiar (rocks, clouds, water) provides a handhold on reality.

Frans Masereel Centrum June 2011
Open Studio January - May 2011
Open Studio January - April 2009