My work is intuitive, and connected to the pattern of everyday life activities. There is no on-and-off in the studio; my working process is constant.  The story that my work tells is my own narrative, which I examine again and again.  I think about things in multiples, with the occasional single object within these large groups.  What I’m doing is building an environment. 

Collecting has a variety of meanings for me, with each collection suggesting something different. Although I gather hundreds of objects, the greater value for me lies in the process and subsequent observation and study.  I collect natural objects; washed up plastics and other debris; small, unusual toys and kitchen items; and ephemera from everyday activity that can be amassed in multiples – like stickers, candy wrappers, dry cleaner tags, plastic container tops, twist ties and rubber bands.  I specifically collect consumer products.  All lists and notes are important.  Collecting from specific geographic locations is also significant.

My choice of materials is deliberate–they symbolize important aspects of my life experience.  I make use of a wide variety of media, from traditional materials to beef liver, beet, pokeberry, iodine, mercurochrome, methiolate, gentian violet, roofing cement, food coloring, hair dye, calamine lotion, indigo, coffee and dirt, to name a few.

I’m drawn to music, and the opportunity to collaborate with other artists.   The process of working back and forth brings out variations on a theme.

The vision that I create is an intuitive investment of emotion into the mundane practice of daily life.

This particular exhibition Denise Tassin: Art Fair of Multiple Personalities brings together disparate veins of my cross media process. The art is displayed in the same manner as at an art fair; not like a traditional gallery exhibition but, salon style as a conglomerate representation of a gallery’s stable of artists. These bodies of work are select samples, from the past five years, of larger autobiographical explorations.  The work is presented in groups similar to the way they would be made and displayed in the studio. It is not important to me that others know the stories behind the work but instead to apply their own experience to the process.  It is however, important to note that the work is founded in real life experience.  The materials and subject matter of my work are often playful, wickedly funny and depressingly serious – all the stuff of everyday life.

December 2004