LYDIA M. DIEMER
Rabbit (detail), mixed media, 2004

Here are the tales, the first and middle thoughts of the lemon chiffon bits of my sister's cousins, their phantom limbs (as in the marginalized hands of the city, any city), and the mutations of a little girl, all with a touch of scum from somewhere in the corner of my house, in a box full of pieces of my path.

And that box: I gather things (scraps, garbage I have found on the street, in my room, pockets, of a particular appearance- handled, stained, delicate, resilient, beautifully deteriorated, with the refinement of a clean break or an ugly businessman, I adore them), I hoard them, they lose specificity as they sit on a shelf, I remember something about each of them, yet it may only be related to a texture, color, shape, but also availability, accessibility, a level of attraction and a level of repulsion, all intrinsic, necessary questions before I grab it or take it.

These items appear nondescript, indistinct to better fit the purposes of their new home- the paper, the story, new relatives and relationships, a new language, instantaneous occurrences culled from disparate places. Before, during, after this transformation, identity is introduced in an object, figure, ground, mark, but disseminated by the formal circumstances of the composition, whispering to the viewer to see the formal significance of the scene, the compositional and conceptual roles of each spatial decision, with lingering uncertainties leading to: how did he chase the little girl into the background of the needlepoint hill, in the graphite grass of adult numeric maneuverings.