About: Patterns, Cycles, Spirals and Troughs
About Me
I’ve been in Japan for the last six years. If you asked me 10 years ago if I thought I would settle down in Japan I would respond with an emphatic “no”. For some reason beyond my reckoning it is my path to be here.
I practiced Zen for a number of years, but the way us Westerners experience something like Zen is almost entirely unrelated to daily living in the East. We’re so enthusiastic about it. Here, it’s present but invisible.
Romance, deep feeling, whimsy and spontaneity are distilled and controlled, they writhe beneath austere blankets, both real and of the mind. Creature comforts? Yes, there are many. Stand naked with many men, I can do that. Pleasure is a science.
All of this feeds future bodies of work.
Artist Statement
Paintings, sculptures, both static and kinetic, video, process work, installation, photography, drawing and note taking are all culturally generative acts. I take part in all of these forms in hopes of providing a comprehensive swathe of sense fulfillments, a fair reflection of society itself. I don’t seek to reflect diversity in terms of race or gender or age or affiliation as much as I seek to create metaphors for diversity by creating art objects that serve as surrogates or stand ins for the entities that are in relationship with one another out there in the world.
Inside the screen, this shield, my body, I experience togetherness and isolation. I am together with society as a whole, apart from it through distinctions of culture and separated from the whole as an individual. I, as an artist, make light of this uncomfortable situation of relationship by creating fantasy worlds. Realizing the gravity of relationship dynamics which lead to choices in art, the coupling of lovers, the creation of families, gangs and nations, and the engineering of machinery, I attempt to have a visual conversation about relationships that is beautiful, profound or tragic or both. Art for me is play within the context of this seriousness.
A major preoccupation in my work is the way we as human beings are driven at our root by an intense need to exist. We can’t get enough of internal and external growth, but we’re mediated by technology, media and the limits of the material world.
The love/hate dynamic that exists between the human world and the industrial/technological world, and humankind’s secret longing to marry our machines are all subjects that inform my particular brand of fantasy semiology. The resulting visual language includes geometric and biomorphic abstraction, sometimes combined together, or combined with other visual elements.
I am interesting in lamenting our addiction and dependency on the artificial world we’ve built around us… and on the other hand I celebrate this human/technological collaboration.