This realization, this inquiry, this apperception, this loss of a vital function of living angers me and has thrust me forward into this pursuit. To reclaim this sense of wonder, to understand how it was lost, and to block the burgeoning decay of my sense of perception is why the art I create exists.
The answer lies in ritualistic anamnestic storytelling. I must remember how I remembered, burst beyond the banal world around me, and recreate what I have, had, and will perceive with a newfound sense of spirituality and wonder.
To accomplish this, I have been using digital compositing technology to actualize a new visual language spoken in marks, movements, and moments. Using sketches, photos, videos, mementos, sounds, and memories as "information", I develop pseudo-algorithms in an optical sense that parses, displaces, and re-invigorates these notions as a new idea and representation in time.
The focus of my work is memory and perception directed towards the past, present, or future. Works dealing with the past often involve revisiting old photographs, video footage, people, and places. The result is an experimental inquiry of how these radially approached notions have aged and settled and become part of my identity.
Works whose focus is the present insist that one attempt to comprehend how one processes a day-to-day environment. Time speeds forward, and perception becomes memory often before it can be felt. These works attempt to capture the process of archiving experiences in memory. Here, I use a camera and/or camcorder to fully document a phenomenon and work with the footage digitally in as much of an abstract-expressionistic style as is possible on a computer. These also question related phenomena such as the importance of memory recorded in technology and the mind and body's response to new thoughts and emotions.
Other works look toward the future. This is no sort of divination, but more of an attempt to focus my mind-reality in a direction towards a new way of perceiving. These works are often purely abstract or inventive and possibly the most cryptic of my works.
I prefer non-literal art. I want a user to acknowledge that my work has meaning, feel that it has meaning, yearn and seek out that meaning, but in no way do I want a viewer to have a definitive grasp on the exactitude of a project. A successful piece enables the user to perceive the meaning of the project, not necessarily understand it.
My strongest influences come not from artist's themselves but from philosophers and art critics, specifically Erich Voegelin and John Berger. With my style, I hope to capture the hauntingly spiritual essence of landscapes by Casper David Friedrich. I am also fascinated by the ideas presented by artists who question the current state of their own personal reality, specifically Vito Acconci and Adrian Piper.
