I like to use found, recycled, and scavenged materials in the art that I make. The whole world is full of potential stuff for making art. It’s this potential for finding intrigue and unordinary beauty in everyday objects and materials that drives my art.
Through art we can be challenged to become present in the moment in a direct apprehension of reality. Our daily lives are often a series of interpretations of signs and symbols from when we wake up in the morning to when we go to sleep at night. Nature, and a direct experience of reality, have often become recreational and vacation experiences in our lives. By using commonplace and recycled materials in my artwork I want to wake up to seeing the everyday and commonplace world in a new light. Sometimes just using a low status material like concrete in a work of art is enough of a surprise to make us take a hard look, at not just the piece of art, but also at our shared values and assumptions about nature and material objects.
Ideally my work strives to challenge the viewers values through use of low status materials in art making. By using common and low status materials I want the viewer to see these materials in a new, unexpected context. I want to alert the viewer’s imagination to the potential for new discoveries in the everyday world if they just take the time to look with eyes unclouded with cultural conditioning.
I want to confront the viewer and cause you to respond to the piece using your imagination. I do this by often suggesting a story or metaphor, something inexact and incomplete, to get you to start trying to figure out what the piece is about. If the work has the ability to get you to really see the piece and engages your imagination, with no solution to the puzzling narrative in sight, then the piece is successful. It brings not just the viewers sensual apprehension, but also their mental and creative involvement to the work, and in that way completes it.
Photos and press release for this artist.
Residency: February 2006 - April 2006
Art Exhibition: Friday, April 21 & Saturday, April 22