artist statement

        I first got into art because I will be dead some day, and everything that I have touched or been touched by will likewise be gone. Once an event has passed or a thought forgotten, there is no way to recapture it, only to evoke it through documentation or elegy. Art is a way of perpetuating memory, though I don't wish to just recite. Through art we can instead go beyond the original, or reveal that what we previously thought as common was really something wonderful. Life is made mostly of things like that, and I'm very concerned with making sure nothing passes by without it being noticed for what it is, and that nothing meaningful gets forgotten. A constant awareness of the importance of now is thus combined with a historical perspective.
        They told us in grade-school English class to write about what you know, and so, expanding this thought to any creative act, I not only use myself as the starting point for making, but I am also my first target audience. I believe this makes work not only more substantial, but more honest. Many try to speak with a lofty, philosophical or political voice that is really not a part of them, about issues they have no experience with. Anything that I produce is consciously based upon my own experiences, aesthetic tastes and aversions, as well as the multitudes of banal objects that surround my life. The personal nature of my work isn't necessarily important for a potential audience to read. If others wish to be directly entertained by my narcissism, that's wonderful, but hopefully my work will provide enough solid content for reflection upon other private worlds, or that what I've brought together will be enough to chew on for awhile.
        This isn't as hard as it sounds, considering the culture that we live in--just being raised in relatively the same time and place means that the contents of your life are going to have a lot of overlap with millions of others, buying the same products, watching the same media, and so on. This communal artificiality is the flavor of our world, and our day to day lives are largely constructed through the slow accumulation of banality, whether it's mass consumer products or family snapshots. None of this warrants much attention, and so through focusing on it as I have in much of my work, there is a decision to be made--should we make what has been impersonal and common intimate and special, or if these objects aren't worth such consideration, then should we eject such things from our lives?
        Though my most recent work has been in digital compositing, my approach even across different mediums has been one of collage or assemblage. Unities, singularities--these are comfortable illusions, simply glossed over to look seamless. I'm more interested in seeing what disparate elements have come together through random historical contingency. "Newness" is therefore a ridiculous horizon to chase, as well. The constant need for novelty is immature, and leaves us lacking perspective--how many have really digested what has already happened in order to be ready for the next step? There is always more to consider--no anachronism has to be obsolete, and each fragment brought forward from a past time stands as a hint of the world that produced it.
        Often, each image or fragmented object that I've imported into a work retains to a degree its visual independence, so that there is an internal interrelation rather than a unidirectional expressive beam outward. These fragments are often arranged in a tension between a rectilinear arrangement (such as a grid) and a more organic gestural form overwhelming it. The construction is often very rough, whether in the crumbling surface of a painted collage, or the pixellated composite of digital images. This is an expression of honesty for me, in that any work that we make is going to be a recombination of those elements that inspired or interested us. I also find such a patchwork aesthetic to be very visually interesting, in that it contains the awareness of the accretion of layers, of the passage of time, of the changing or overlapping of uses. I often photograph such surfaces or places that seem to have the same presence of time, of accretion or wear--what many would call urban decay. The overlapping, worn paint advertisements on an old brick building, a gutted 70's style grocery store in mid-remodel--sad, but sincere markers of human activity. These are increasingly rare relics in our booming economy and "newness" obsessed culture, that seems to want to replace everything with something new and seamless. I'd rather point to the seams.

postdlf
2000

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