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Ordering Principles

Juxtaposing disparate parts, I develop a personal sense of place in the world, informed by history, nature, and cultures.  The goals of my practice are to challenge commonplace assumptions, and celebrate the phenomena of perception.  I am drawn to certain cultural materials with an urge to intervene, in order to hack, remix, or reverse-colonize mass mediums.  A tendency toward experimentation and my attention to systems lead me to work across new and old media using the sensibilities of collage.

 

My interest in history coincides with a practice of fusing pre-electronic visual technologies with digital imaging and video.  In doing so, I apply the optical wonder of stereoscopes, zoetropes, and kaleidoscopes to contemporary themes, often providing viewers with an interactive experience.  In some pieces, I seek to elevate individual participation to an ecstatic immersive experience.  In others, such hybridization offers me the opportunity to reconfigure historical contexts within illusory spaces, in order to challenge cultural memory and perception.

 

To make the “Stereocollision” series I digitally mixed images and text appropriated from antique stereographs to present composite scenes of globalization and power.  The installation invites viewers into early 20th Century parlor setting to read the cards and enjoy their 3D imagery, giving a point of view within troubled Western luxury and dominance.  Tourists observe worshippers, monkeys hold council in a government hall, and soldiers guard a crowded market place.  In evaluating these places, one is confronted with subtly disorienting hybrids, which may seem almost plausible at first glance within the modern phenomena of accelerated global transit and cross-cultural influence.

 

“Buzzard Hill: Summer Solstice on Ballard Fields Ranch”, is one of several personal investigations of geography in which I assemble a montage of individual snap-shots to expand notions of photographic time and space.  By starting on the sun and extending this method out to the entire sphere of my view, the work connects the cycle of the year and the circle of the sky to the details of the immediate landscape and my body.  The locations I choose for this series are sites of steady personal significance from which I assemble my view of the world.

 

Crossing these various disciplines, I work to orient myself within time, geography, and culture.  By weaving fact and fiction, documentary and artifice, I explore recurrent social and existential themes.
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