ARTIST STATEMENT

Our universe is shaped by cycles of proliferation, communication, consumption, mutation, and decay. Just as our physical masses are in a constant state of flux, our identities, memories, ideas, and collectively-formed histories are also subject to the same laws of evolution that govern all life in the universe. Social conditioning shapes our genders and our behaviors, ripping apart and then reconfiguring our personalities. From before the moment of conception, to long after the moment of our deaths, our very beings are waxing and waning with exchanges of energy and matter, a ceaseless dance of atoms and intentions.

Bodies die, and with death our molecules and our spirits are dispersed into the world, only to be reabsorbed by new aggregate forms. Populations grow and decline. Laws shift and taboos flower. Belief systems are generated and then abandoned into a greater soup of historical activity. Gods, deities, and mythologies have lifespans, as their existence depends upon the ever-shifting consensus of their interpreters. Science has become increasingly focused upon micro-/macro- cosmic relationships, orders of complexity, and accumulation, while human mythology has been primarily concerned with the anthropomorphism of nature. Somewhere between observation, theory, and action lies art.

My recent interactive work references these natural processes in several ways. I use modular components, repetition, accumulation, variation, and chance to emphasize changes in arrangement and meaning. Viewers are invited to discover elements within the work, to rearrange them at will, and to determine the degree of their complicity in the evolution of a tableau-vivante. New meanings emerge from combinations both accidental and deliberate. The curiosity of one viewer may profoundly alter the experience of another.

I am especially interested in the telescoping of history by use of juxtaposition and appropriation. Artists over the millennia have frequently borrowed imagery or narratives from older cultures, breathing new life into ancient legends for artistic or political purposes. Actions such as these have the potential for creating pinches or folds in the time-space continuum. I am harvesting dead aesthetics and historical motifs in order to poetically describe the mechanisms of evolution.

Me with my wonderful friend Sarah Miller, photographed at an old-timey tourist photo shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans, in May of 2010. The photographer was completely bewildered by our request, but he did a great job. Here's his shop on Rue St. Ann. Tell him The Madame sent you.