Artist StatementMaking art is akin to standing on your head. It requires dedication, practice, and an ability to embrace the process in all its failures and often fleeting successes. But most importantly, during this process and / or as a result, the world is turned upside down and viewed in new, strange, exciting, and even contrary ways. There are many experiences and memories along with confrontations with social and cultural constructions that confuse or cause anxiety for me. I have learned to use anxiety and confusion as a point of departure or a signal to relinquish control and follow that conceptual dowsing rod. Along the way, I research, collect, observe, rearrange, combine, and dissect parts or the whole of issues I’m drawn to in an attempt to find better awareness of their origin and / or implication. I utilize video, photography, found imagery, language, performance, interactivity, and installation among any other medium suited to the project. Working this way allows me to collect and catalog specimens, much like an entomologist or paleontologist might, to then live with the archive and over time draw out those instances of confrontation with uncertainty. I have used my research in various pursuits including attempts to unfold small sub-sections of rural, hegemonic masculinity and normative genders roles prescribed by regional pockets of society as well as select complexities of contemporary identity and the growing neo-nationalism in our lived, daily reality. I make, ultimately, in the pursuit to understand and grow. Through my art, I am able to at times expose and disarm anxiety and uncertainty via meditation, mediation, repetition, collection, (de)contextualization, and reconstructed experience. In doing so, I work to create conversation with my audience, or make obvious questions / concerns that we may have become oblivious or desensitized to. This living conversation is the point of my work, but this point rests not on a line, but rather a circle. |