Detailed Biography

"A work in skin is almost a performance. The kneeling, stretching and stroking involved in the creation of the image create also their own choreography, repeated over hours and days until the pattern is entrenched. Surprising in the wake of all this activity is the underwater feeling the final work elicits, the woolly sense of the unconscious. The work's very repose feels haunted, as though we were looking at the silent aftermath of some ritual violence. Which, of course, we are. Still, the carnivorous nature of the work is offset by the way its surface seems to invite our touch, the way its interior provides a refuge. There is brutality in its past but there is also a long and attentive caress. It's a lot like life. Everything leaves a scar. In the end, your skin tells your story.

So we are left with a challenge: to look beyond the violence of the material, the memory of flaying embodied in the use of leather, to the claim it makes about taking. In the end it's a claim about gentleness, about what we need. About the cruelty of our needs and the loving way we fulfill them. It's all here: the violence we inflict, the violence inflicted upon us, the tender ways we find redemption."

Sarah Bernbach
http://www.ps1.org/cut/Gny/mlopez.html