Artist’s Statement
In my work I am interested in exploring and addressing the cryptic and unfathomable aspects of the physical world. How does a human truly experience, and what are the boundaries and limitations of the human preceptory medium? My artistic practice directly relates to philosophical themes of sentience, perception, hypnotic dissociation, sensory depth, and the revealing of hidden life force. I am interested in art's ability to address and examine the confines of the human sensory experience.
As an artist, I often work abstractly. I believe that by creating work that relinquishes attachment to the physical, one can use art as a spiritual mechanism to envision other dimensions of perception that exist outside of everyday experience. Through abstract art making, artistic consumption and creation can become a transportive medium that allows for the interfacing of the real and the surreal, the physical and the spiritual, and the conceptual and the concrete.
My artistic practice is extensively inspired by natural phenomena, and the complex abstraction inherent to the everyday physical world. Examples of this abstraction include ripples in bodies of water, geological topographical patterns viewed from an airplane, and the formation of clouds. In my artistic practice, I attempt to harness and collaborate with these natural abstract phenomena through the incorporation of randomness, wherein I allow the materiality of the medium that I am working in to take control and ultimately effect the final piece. Examples of this method of art making include leaving a drawing outside for natural weather systems to effect and alter the image, allowing paint to spill and drip, and running paintings through a dishwasher. The artistic effects that are achieved through these processes seem inherently random and accidental, but in my mind, these effects are in fact pre-prescribed. They do not necessarily happen as a result of my intention, but they do happen as a result of the natural systems and forces that govern the universe. Paint will spill, drip, and mix as a result of gravity, momentum, and the chemical compounds that make up the paint's medium, pigment, and vehicle.
In my exploration of randomness in art making, I feel that I am exploring the artistic hand of the universe, and the laws that govern it. In my digital artwork in genres such as video and new media, this is also the case, but instead of exploring physical laws of matter, I am exploring digital consciousness, hoping to use the sentience of my computer and is various programs as a collaborator. In my digital pieces, I attempt to peel back the layers of computational systems, arriving at a final destination that addresses and examines silicon consciousness and computer mind. The questions I often address in these pieces are as such: What occurs under the numerous and complex layers prevalent is a computational system? What unknown sentience lies behind the veil of internet browsing and social media?