artist's statement and bio for the catalogue:

This cabinet combines strategies and techniques from furniture making traditions, graphic design and photo processes to tell a visual story. The story is about two men - John Manjiro in Japan and Herman Melville in New Bedford, Ma., who set off on sea voyages within 3 days of each other in January of 1841, crossing the oceans in opposite directions , Melville toward Japan and Manjiro eventually to Fairhaven (New Bedford). Both men played their parts in the story of the opening of Japan to the West, the drifting of ideas and cultures carrying through to today, while still smelling the same oceans, hearing the same birds - two men in nature and history. The story is told in an abstract way with the open ended, overlapping, non-linear meanings particular to images, including images of text. The Moby Dick images, for instance, can be read for the actual Rockwell Kent imagery - like the crow's nest, which could be imagined as Melville himself on his first whaling voyage - or as an image representing the book Moby Dick and its place in our histories, all superimposed on a piece of furniture. This seems logical to me, in the logic perhaps of the Japanese tea bowl, because a cabinet is made to hold things, a special cabinet made with great care and purpose is made to hold special things, so this cabinet could be said to hold ideas and stories on its surface through purpose made images of my own - drawings and photos made from nature locally - as well as appropriated images from various sources.

Besides the narrative content about Melville, John Manjiro and New Bedford harbor, the piece is a visual proposal. The graphics are about diagonals - all the exciting things you might do with diagonals. There's a rhythm of positive/negative. There's a grid structure -the artsy scrapbook, or the graphic novel - japanized by the off centered, asymmetrical, Mikado-like, coy cocking of the head in the placement of the images. The blue and white cyanotype prints open up another cliched image of Japan. There's an attempt to balance the simple sweeping form - the box on stand - and the slight chaos of the floating graphic strategy. You could say there's some appropriation of images, though that might be a very 80's way of seeing it. I prefer to think of it, in the age of Facebook, as a way to affect the great digital image flow.