Baby Pictures is a series of paintings about the social and political foundations of faith-based patriotism. They reference conceptual structures and archetypal symbols that dramatize the authority of unseen agents embedded in sacred places.
 
Baby Pictures was motivated by viewing the battle scenes inscribed in the mosaic floor of the Duomo in Siena, Italy.  These scenes commemorate sacrifices of the flesh suffered in the quest for spiritual domination and enforce a belief system built upon the bloody ground where conflict takes place. The paintings revisit this ground to show how art is used to sublimate the horror of warring states and to evaluate contradictions inherent in cultural production.
 
Baby Pictures are punctuated with cross-cultural narratives carried forth in pictorial history.  These include excerpts from Indian miniatures, Japanese woodcuts, GAP blankets, and ecclesiastical vestments.  Borders and folds interrupt, frame, and intensify the relation between improbable realms of coherence and exaggerate the relation between separable parts. For example, Loose Dogs and Hung Tortoise suggest a relation between instinct and intellect.  Three dogs resurrected from floor of the cathedral are conjoined with a layout of the dome that has been reduced to an empty honeycomb pattern resembling a molecular structure. Hung Tortoise, dangling on a rope from an interior window, is conjoined with a replica of a black, red and white painted rock wall that bounds the perimeter of a playground in my neighborhood.  The alchemical colors of the wall and the magical qualities associated with the hexagonal design of the tortoise shell evoke the mystery of transformations that take the totality of interrelationships into account – life, mind, culture and consciousness.