If I’m connected to people I’ve never met, is it still real?

These are abstracted mixed-media portraits. Five are of artist friends and one is of me. We knew each other first because of and then through social media, and I had only met two of them in person before I finished these. I sourced text from each artist’s personal Facebook page, looking for what seemed to capture the essences of the artists’ work as I had come to know it. I wanted to make tangible the long physical distance of  between us as well as the electronic miles-erasing connection we had made.

These are sculptural mixed media pieces made with wood, wax, silk tissue, aluminum sheeting, and nails.