I am more interested in growing art than in designing it. I use drawing, sculpture, painting and installation media to create systems of production, where the form is generated from the process of making it. The products often relate to natural phenomena and cultural artifacts that have made an impression on me: tree rings, biological dissection, wind-carved canyons, stalactites and stalagmites, cloud formations, water currents and other kinds of turbulence, bubble chambers, scientific diagrams, measurements of cosmic background radiation. The systems I use accumulate, extrapolate, animate, project or filter materials. They often include a certain amount of “noise” that is either inherent in the materials or arises through the circumstance of their making. In this way, I try to model natural processes. I work toward complex forms that make connections between everyday life and events beyond daily experience, infusing the microscopic and the cosmic back into the ordinary, estranging it and opening it up to new points of view.
Lists, builds imagery
from text taken from a series of lists I kept over a period
of approximately one year. These include shopping lists,
names of books, authors and musicians, and any other needful
things that were enumerated during that time. Lists
reconnects the mundane world of daily wants and needs
by subjecting the text to processes that reproduce certain
patterns in found in nature: seasonal cycles that bring
accumulations of leaves and falling snowflakes, the daily
movement of the sun that casts ever-changing shadows on
the ground, and the slow accretion of chemicals by which
shellfish build their homes. Each of the elements that
comprise the installation at the James Watrous Gallery
builds on the words that make up the lists in different
ways: accumulating, extrapolating, animating, projecting
and filtering the information in ways that remind us of
these other things, which may seem distant from the shopping
mall and grocery store but are still strangely connected.
Perimeter
uses photographic imagery taken around the edges
of Madison's Lakes Mendotoa and Monona and the Yahara
River. By stitching together these images and transposing
them to the edges of the DeRicci Gallery as a single,
layered ink drawing that loops back on itself, the installation
presents an accumulated image of the fluctuating boundaries
between land and water, liquid and solid, where the natural
and cultural overlap.
Inverted
Lakes is based on the inverted topographical
readings of the bottoms of Madison’s Lakes Monona
and Mendota, modeled in ice that was frozen on site with
water from the Yahara River that connects the two lakes.
While playfully re-imagining Madison as nestled between
two looming hills, the ice sculpture is also an attempt
to re-envisioning a lost clarity by making visible again
what is now hidden by murky and polluted waters. The gradual
melting of the piece also mirrors the loss in clarity
of the lakes over time due to changing environmental conditions.
Everything
looks Better from Far Away is a series of small
oil paintings on mylar based on satellite images of bombing
sites, civilian shootings, trampled shrines, a prison
complex, and other places that have figured large in the
Western media’s news coverage of events in Iraq.
By reproducing the delicately woven patterns of geography,
architecture, weather and infrastructure of the original
satellite photos, the paintings retrace the background
of the current media, political and military campaigns
and present them at an abstract and comfortable distance.
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