the old artist statement
I like lists, humor, streams of consciousness, and well-formed essays. This is not a well-formed essay.
My work is informed by anthropology, the holistic study of cultures past and present. I refer to the methods and theories of visual anthropology, the anthropology of media, and reflexive anthropology. Reflexivity of one’s own method reveals the ethnographic process, of the individual creating it, and of the individuals involved.
I create context; field notes, video, photography, and other research materials to be viewed as connected parts of a whole.
Images can be used to create and explain realities, by connecting varying experiences. We represent our culture through media, then we take it back, mix it up, and make new culture, which is the re-represented in even newer media.
My method of creating work depicts how our brains process visual images in a different way than it does text and words. An elicitation of images can be used to garner a response from a person, as well as be used as a collaborative research method. Visual images evoke a new and different kind of information that goes beyond ‘traditional’ research.
This is how I make my art. I primarily use the medium of digital photography. This is where it all starts. I use the stills to create panoramas, to create time-lapse videos, within simulation design, with and without audio, and integrate one or more of those into another or two.
These are things I am concerned with:
The aesthetic versus the theory: do they work in tandem, or against each other?
Personal and cultural narratives, learned through participatory art making.
The passing of time, and of memory.
Space versus place, spaces of meaning, relations of space; and how person versus power versus commerce interact within and around.
The re-telling of these stories through art, media, and digital means.
These are not sentences, but like I said, this isn’t a well-formed essay. It’s just a statement.