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Artist Statement
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My work focuses on
reproductive processes to investigate the types of distortion that may
occur as information is translated and multiplied. I am trying to generate
a set of spatial circumstances that assimilate the forced fitting of personal
experience into cultural systems of meaning (i.e. words and images), while
investigating the ways that meaning is disseminated back into culture.
By building images out of smaller images and words I make transparent
the process used to construct what might look like a solid image from
a distance. Upon closer inspection the perceived stability breaks down
into smaller systems of information that may either enforce or disturb
prior readings. What I hope to explore, through what I think of as a genetic
or architectural method of image-making, is a more destabilized understanding
of identity and meaning; as the way we identify things is influenced and
in flux due to our physical positioning and the accumulation of individual
histories.
In my drawings I use images and words as generative matter that is the
impetus, but not the outcome of a process. I work with marks in a manner
similar to the use of dots in Pointillism and dot matrixes in the contemporary
reproduction of printed matter, attempting to generate images in a biological
manner; where the particle can attach to other particles forming larger
organisms. In these systems a small set of information, say, four colors
and a dot, can create an infinite set of images. By replacing the dot
with language and image I disrupt the neutrality of the “point”
with physical shape and, hopefully, a psychological history to see what
effects the parts might have on the whole.
My performance and installation work emphasizes more explicitly the physical
remains of recurring action. The performances use the concept of mechanized,
labored action inherent in the drawings, but attempt to first devise the
physical set of circumstances that would lead to a future image/video/object
(most likely a combination of the three). In this work I am thinking about
the gallery or museum as an empty stage, where the audience has missed
the play and must piece together the parts to reach a conclusion.
As my work moves between different methods of production and reproduction
(drawing, casting, performance, film, video, robotics), I am trying to
test both the possibilities and the limitations of our various modes of
communication. I am trying to conceive of a more fluid interaction between
the meaning created by our environment and the meaning we project onto
the events in our lives. Within the methods of image reproduction I have
discussed I would like to explore the nature of understanding, as it depends
upon difference and separation, and the effects this may have on our perception,
as the way we “see” is filtered through the conceptual boundaries
we construct.
The language used to influence public meaning or opinion is closely intertwined
with the language of image making. The desire to create point of view,
to frame and compose, decontextualize, restructure, cast, erase, define,
etc., are all methods image-makers use to influence opinion, sell products,
and raise questions. Part of my interest in making and remaking images
rests in exploring the structures of influence developed to assist image-makers
and to make these things visible and opaque, so that I and the work I
make can continue to question the things that form my personal systems
of identifying and defining.
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