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I make sculptures,
media works, and installations about the world around me, touching both
timeless themes and urgent issues. My work incorporates elements of Americana,
both popular and obscure, which are distorted via subtle shifts in form,
context, scale and methods of viewer interaction.
Each work I make serves as an open metaphor. Each work is a dynamic of
relationships between concrete materials, slippery icons, and sentimentalized
processes. I don't work in any one medium. Each medium is too burdened
for me to use any one consistently. I don't work in any one milieu. We
live in a society reliant upon advanced industry and consumerism. Each
day, we encounter too wide a range of objects and sensations for me to
isolate my whims and strategies to just one avenue.
I am obsessed by the phenomena we call "meaning." Artistic meaning, the
sort of meaning that answers that age-old question, "But what does it
mean?" is most certainly an emergent entity. You: your engagement, your
biases, your ideals; the artwork: its object reality, its aesthetic properties,
its historical context; both of you and your constituent parts are engaged
in a broad, messy, simultaneous interaction. Both of these bundles-you
and the artwork-are essential and responsible ingredients in this primordial
soup. This process, this mystery of human cognition, fascinates me, motivates
me, and directs my studio practice.
I want my works to generate complex meanings, meanings that tumble from
clarity into contradiction, chaos and then back again. These complexities
echo themes my work explores: national identity, leadership, the individual
in society, romantic love, our relationship to landscape, definitions
of home. Complexity emerges in the liminal zone between chaos and order.
Meaning emerges somewhere between sensation and thought, body and mind.
In my work, a pattern of paradox has emerged, with a number of classical
dichotomies occupying the same space: the minimal and the baroque, the
sparse and the robust, the sentimental and the flippant, the timely and
the anachronistic, the patriotic and the traitorous. All these show up
in a broad body of work that is simultaneously sincere and ironic.
Complexity emerges out of that narrow boundary between chaos and order.
My work comes directly out that territory.
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