artist statement

As humans we are driven to seek happiness, and very often along the way we create suffering. My work addresses the suffering inherent in the human condition and examines the dilemma this poses for our incessant quests for happiness while critiquing my own notions of transcendence and enlightenment . I take an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach to e xploring constructed mental and physical boundaries of all kinds--including self (and other), inside (and outside), real (and unreal). A core conceptual thread is the integration of all aspects of one's being.

As a multidisciplinary artist, my primary media includes but is not limited to digital photography and video, performance, installation and filmmaking. Contemplative ritual, both codified and self-constructed as "art," serves as a primary source of interest for my photography, video, performance and installation. As art object or installation, the work often reveals and documents that which is beyond my control--time, unconscious thoughts, unwilled emotions; the residue of the actions or events that result are reborn to have their own identity as they are reconfigured, enter the public sphere, and change infinitely with time, context and viewer. The work functions to analyze, critique and give form to my experience on the path of transformation: the dissatisfaction and separation from joy and equanimity that results, for example, from experiencing the act of perceiving as inherently dualistic.

Performance is often in the form of personal ritual or repetitive action. Within this, the private vs. public dynamic is activated, as intimate enactments marked by self-exploration and self-witnessing of embodiment become intertwined with meditative ritual as performance in the public sphere. Any resulting documentation/object is consciously directed and manipulated, anticipating the future gaze of the audience. The gaze itself exaggerates the work's evidentiary role while questioning the reality of its constructed representation. What emerges is a rich platform for creative expression, discussion and contemplation.

As an emerging filmmaker, I am interested in documentary and narrative films that address subjects embodying oppositional stance(s) at the core of their being. Specifically, individuals, groups of people or cultural phenomena that are comprised of a dualistic nature, torn between two (or more) diametrically oppositional views or positions--absurd and sensible, flamboyant and restrained, significant and trivial. Drawing from traditional visual styles such as cinéma verité as well as innovative narrative and visual techniques, my interest is in story telling that exposes the importance of creative people and creativity in Western culture and the fascinating and often dichotomous circumstances that surround such subject matter.

My visual art references Minimalism, Conceptualism and performance and body art, frequently bridging the ancient and the modern, the physical and the ephemeral. Engaging the viewer with the strangely familiar, I create visually evocative experiences to articulate the play of oscillatory exchange between such contiguously existing notions as confusion and clarity, profane and sacred, exoteric and esoteric. By taking on the dualistic role of both the critic and the subject of critique, I dismantle and dissect the ideas, concepts and veils that obscure my own consciousness from experiencing moments of contemplation and the frisson of complete presence or wakefulness.