Artist
Statement

I seek out the intrinsic properties of natural phenomena to develop highly experiential artworks. I hope to capture the imagination with poetics and beauty, often at the threshold of perceptual awareness. Ephemeral materials and non-materials such as light, video, and sound are given voice through meta-cognitive, psycho-physiological, and empirical means of negotiating with an immersive artwork. Calibrating time-based compositions to the human senses is an attempt to uncover how phenomena resonate with our bodies.

In a previous light installation, A Line Through the Center of Space (2009), viewers are drawn through a darkened space by following the sound of a wine glass singing. The source of this Siren song emanates from a head sized opening in a flowing black structure that resembles a well. Curious participants look into the circular viewing portal to experience piercing red and blazing blue rings inexplicably expanding and contracting at the bottom. These infinitely reverberating moving images invoke the concentricity of the mandala. Time spent with the piece results in heightened optical phenomena such as after images, the appearance of the rings (displayed on the hidden monitor) ascending and descending in three dimensional space, vertigo, and synesthetic qualities. This installation presents a platform for light and color to communicate transcendental modes of being through offering the viewing portal as an extruded eye.

Horizon in the Fold (2010) is a piece that demonstrates the potentiality of a path toward meta-materials. It is an attempt to create material not found in nature, yet inspired by it, through viewer synthesis. By projecting thin columns of saturated light onto the structural folds of a domestic white curtain a liminal environment is created. Fans slowly breeze the curtain side to side and these columns of light correspondingly move in and out of sync with the swaying vertical folds of the curtain. Fusing the virtual field of light onto the curtain’s surface presents a horizon of sea and sunset hues flipped on their side and set upon a planar viewing ground. Perception becomes the very modality to experience this synthetic composition through tuning the form and function of the piece to the optic system. This work can further be approached as an instrument of visual music, drawing upon a rich history of moving image and projected light movements of the last century.

Presentations of possible truths imbued with beauty is central to my work. I feel that nature is constantly communicating new ways to understand the world. Providing pathways from the physical to the mental world allows for me, as an artist, to give voice to materials and phenomena that evoke meaningful connections with our sensing systems.