Recap

This is kind of a lame post, but I didn't really have anything new ready for today as Saturday was all about preparing for the party and Sunday was all about recovery. I thought I'd post my artist statement. Some viewers of this blog may never have read my statement and it is still pretty representative of my work even though it's a couple of years old. I'm going to start work on a new one very soon, however. Here it is:


Can the sublime exist in contemporary life; could it exist in something thought “low?” Could the act of dissecting that which enchants me, creating a new, mysterious experience out of my meanings help me to understand my reality and truths? I see the ideas of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment as analogous to a poetical image of paradise, encounter with chaos, fall, and redemption; these processes also being linked to a universal way in which humans adapt to the unknown.

Charles Baudelaire claimed that the infinite can be found in the nature of the transitory. My work arises out of mining artifice from themed casinos and fashion imagery. This investigation has much to do with my own attempt to identify that which beguiles and attracts me in various places and images; an attempt to divine the psychological projections I bring to my experiences or find mystery in contemporary life and its encounters. I yearn for hints of a world unknown to me, a romance and mystery that has been lost through the acquiring of knowledge and understanding of the world. In wanting to comprehend my experiences with specific ephemeral, fugitive places and images, I take them for the stand-ins that they are, but seek out points where they “bump up against” unifying principals, where the frivolous and the superficial has meaning.

Doing this, I create altar-like installations out of a distillation of my experiences with the artificial, the installations of course being fraught with artifice themselves. The manipulation of light and its play with color, scale, and space offers the tonality, the tincture of my sources to the viewer. Compelled by natural drives for ideals and a way of coping with the unknown, I am drawn to fantasy, to places and objects of artifice that function as stand-ins for the universal principals that I long for in a time when the idea of a universal has been sacked.