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As an artist, I have been focused
on expression and the translation of ideas through the visual language. I
have maintained an interdisciplinary attitude towards my work and have given
myself license to use whatever means necessary to relate my ideas. This interdisciplinary
approach allows me to access a variety of media and use a diverse and eclectic
vocabulary in the creation of my work.
I consider myself a kind of modern archaeologist and the creative process
is an opportunity for me to study culture. I find, appropriate, and rescue
elements of our modern society out of garbage piles, vacant lots, junk yards,
thrift stores, novelty stores, old books, archives, etc...and utilize these
details to comment on my own surroundings. Each item has an inherent or attached
value as well as a visual potential all its own and I consider everything
I collect for its intellectual and aesthetic possibilities.
I am fascinated by the relationship between emotion and intellect and enjoy
combining and recombining recognizable materials and images into new and unexpected
relationships. Playing with the association between the visual and intellectual
aspects of cultural materials stimulates ideas, memories and concepts within
my own mind. When I create images or objects or spaces or actions, it is as
if I am creating a story based of the meanings, values, and aesthetics of
the elements I use. I like using materials in this manner because I feel that
they can relate insights into our culture or society that cannot be expressed
through verbal or written languages.
The creative process allows me to bring my personality into the commentaries
that I create and lets me to make the work more personal. Through the materials
and images, I exercise my own sense of curiosity and create stories that are
designed to illustrate my own reflections of time and place. In this manner,
I can narrate, satirize, question, and comment on aspects of my own physical
and psychological environment. By manipulating contents and contexts, I make
each piece an abstraction of things we know, see, and understand as a society
and tell of our contemporary culture through my own search for meaning.
In history, materials and images can tell us more about culture because they
can survive through time. In fact, materials, objects and images can often
become more representative of society or culture than any other facet because
of their ability to survive. As an artist, it is my hope that the viewer will
be able to connect with each piece because they recognize an element or elements
and become drawn into the work as a result of that recognition. Once involved
with a piece the viewer can begin to decipher some of the latent meanings
and begin to interact with the work based on their own reactions.
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