For the Love of

For the Love of explores the individual and collective, the microscopic and the galatic using the base consituent of life.

For the love of is composed of fifty twenty-four inch square archive color prints, mounted on plexiglas and arranged in a tight grid ten feet high by twenty feet in length. Each panel is an image of 10 ml of blood taken from one of fifty individuals, photographed in such a way to reveal the deep, multilayered transparency of the blood. Ten Buddhists, ten Christians, ten Muslims, ten Jews, and ten Hindus were selected for this work; mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, sisters, and brothers - a cross section of biology, ethnicity and human dynamics. The panels are randomly installed with no regard for group or relationships. The actual identity of each individual remains unknown.

Each photograph captures something highly personal and authentic; a unique glimpse of the literal river of life. Once each panel is positioned side by side, in its entirety, these individuals become a part of one powerful whole with no distinctions. Blood is one of the most basic human elements, one that is shared by all people, no matter their race, sex, religion or culture. Taking 50 different blood samples and displaying them together as one whole deconstructs the concept of individuality by blurring the difference between the personal and the universal. That which is shed in times of violence and war is also that which binds and gives life. This installation deals with both life and death, as blood is at the immediate core of both. The beauty and richness of the color, on one hand invoke the rich drapery of altarpieces from the Italian renaissance or suggests the surfaces of planets, and on the other, the very potent corporeal presence of the most basic component of human life.