Artist Statement

My work as a multi-media artist is motivated first and foremost by conceptual concerns.  I select materials and tools based on how they relate to the ideas I am exploring.  This approach has resulted in a body of work that traverses many different media, most often taking form as a hybrid of installation, video, new media and performance.  With these multi-media tools I then engage in a performative process.  By performative I am referring to the post-modern notion that reality is constructed through experience, representation and performance and that modern myths can be deconstructed through a conscious engagement with these same processes.  I see art as a dynamic phenomenon that, when merged with a performative approach, has the potential to uncover, deconstruct, reframe, and shed light onto philosophical concerns.  I utilize a wide variety of media to express my conceptual and performative artistic explorations. 

My work has been highly influenced by my interest in the body as a metaphor for personal, cultural and conceptual issues.  Inspired by the performance art movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, my early work utilized the body either as raw material or as an object of kinetic sculpture, emphasizing movement through space.  Ranging from concerns with the abject to the transpersonal, I performed durational pieces in reference to various aspects of embodied experience.  Much of the work explored modern archetypes, deconstructing their meaning for the individual while other works depersonalized the features of the body and utilized performance as kinetic expression exploring form and light.

In 2001, I began to fuse my performative approach with digital video.  I became interested in how the mediation of culture, through the use of technological devices, influenced the phenomenological experiences of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity.  I began to use the video screen as a malleable membrane, constantly negotiating the flexible space between the viewer and the video/digital body.  My use of digital video and interactive technologies is embedded in my interest in the “televisual body”.

The “televisual body”, a term coined by Amelia Jones, is defined as the body presented through a screened surface and possessing characteristics that identify it as being created through a television or digital signal.  An important aspect of my work is exploring this dialogue between the flesh and mediated screen.  These interests have resulted in the incorporation of interactive technologies using physical computing devices and interactive video programming software.  Having the skills to use the new media technologies I am able to speak directly to the conceptual and philosophical tenets I want to explore.  It is through active engagement with the materials that I gain new insights into the ontological nature of the media as well as the individual, social and cultural implications.