Before his death in 2008, the groundbreaking American artist Robert “Bob” Rauschenberg was quoted as saying, "You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined."
As an artist at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Florida for 6 weeks in March and April 2017, I lived and worked in that "hole in between.” Whether at sunrise on the Pine Island Sound, sunset on the Gulf of Mexico, on the wharf under Bob’s beloved Fish House, in the jungle on his 20 acres of land, at my laptop playing with photos all hours of the night and day, at a Friday night music jam for locals at Jensen’s Marina, or photographing us 11 artists-in-residence from around the world as we created our different forms of art in Bob’s studios and shared meals and conversation at the Weeks House, there was no distinction between my life and art. It was all one. Bob’s infectious energy and "everything is possible" attitude sent me off into what he called "undefined" territory.
For me that translated into an entirely new body of work that features photo collages I create using bits and pieces of the 7,000 photographs I took during the residency. The project began late one night when an image I was trying to fit into the narrow confines of a preconceived idea broke free and followed its own path. That first collage of the Fish House at sunrise, former artist-in-residence Pat Oleszko’s shamanistic sculpture, a heron and turtle led to an ongoing long-term project called “The Hole In Between: Collages from the Rauschenberg Residency.”
