Statement

In my mind I’m an exploded painter, taking painting as my starting point and building sculpture and dioramas that get turned into photos, videos, and installations. I trace visual echos of 19th Century Romantic painting like Casper David Frederich’s Sea of Ice to televisions Superman’s (Smallville‘s) Fortress of Solitude and reconstruct those shapes … with noodles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m a collector of other peoples discarded junk and tchotchkes and 19th century representations of the polar regions. I cross this with climate change writing like Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe. To my lay-person’s perspective the science is often visually inspiring. For instance the retro-futuristic sounding programing language, FORTRAN used to  predict climate models with blocks of atmosphere, like a checker board in the sky, consisting of 33 hundred boxes x 12 boxes each measuring 4 degrees latitude x 5 degrees longitude. There will be stop motion animated boxes in my videos or necker cubes in my drawings!

Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is also a source of inspiration.

It is a convention of Western thought to believe all cultures are compelled to explore, that human beings seek new land because their economies drive them onward. Lost in this valid but nevertheless impersonal observation is the notion of a simpler longing, of a human desire for a less complicated life, for fresh intimacy and renewal. These, too, draw us into new landscapes. And desire causes imagination to misconstrue what it finds. The desire for wealth, for revivification, for triumph, as much or more than scientific measurement and description, or the imperatives of economic expansion, resolves the geography of a newfound landscape.