I only see out of one eye at a time. An optometrist suggested to me once that I might have never seen the world in three dimensions. In other words it’s all flatland to me out there. As a kid, I often knocked things over when I reached for them. Contrary to commonly held views of family members at home, it wasn’t because I was clumsy. I was incapable of judging distances correctly. Three-point perspective is something I have never experienced as anything other than an intellectual or technical exercise. Fear of heights is not typical in my family. I have cousins who worked as high-rise steel men. When I look down from any elevation, my body tends to “seize up.” I cannot discern how close to the edge I am standing by simply peering.
I did not discover my optical handicap until my thirties. That’s at least a decade after I’d made my first “real” painting. I was a sophomore at Notre Dame. My roommate had exiled me to the art building and art classes, because I was accidentally splattering paint all over our 12’ x 12’ dorm room. I’d started painting tee shirts with Vogart fabric pens. When they broke, sometimes they sent strands of oil-based color across the room. I loved that. When Scott (my roomie) no longer could tolerate my Pollack-esque extravagances, which had ruined some of his belongings, he pronounced an ultimatum, and off to the art building I went. I started selling those painted tee shirts to students, then to boutiques, then celebrities, then through museums. Eventually, I was offered $1,000,000 to execute 250,000 of them for Montgomery Wards and others. I rejected that opportunity, because along the way, I fell in love with painting. My first “real” painting depicted a Cyclops staring forlornly at the viewer, etched into silkscreen inks on a hexagonal piece of masonite (a tee shirt support), similar technically to those crayon artworks (etchings revealing colors beneath a layer of black) primary school teachers have their kids make. Behind the Cyclops for some reason I’d etched a line denoting a hilltop, upon which I had drawn a defensive earthwork of the American Revolutionary era. I think the Cyclops held a musket, bayonet affixed. My etching into that ink on board, with the wrong end of the paintbrush, was entirely a spontaneous event. No one told me I could or should create my Cyclops. It happened in the middle of a production run, during (I think) my second semester of art classes. Around this time, I began to egregiously neglect my English Major studies. I slept infrequently and worked insane hours. I began to travel nearly every weekend. My entire perceptual apparatus became devoted to the development of an artistic eye. I scanned over 20,000 folios in the Notre Dame library in two years time. I visited hundreds of galleries and museums. I commenced to live a life that would make a good artist’s biography. I embraced gesture, romance, tragedy, war, dreaming, revelry, nature, civilization, politics, science, subculture, technology, subversion… In the end, I was embraced by the spiritual, the tribal and the anecdotal, and these, along with Art, saved my life. In other words, Art led me to Humanity. This is what my art is “about.”
I think that my mind has compensated (for my monoptical state) in the same way a blind man’s will (heightening other senses to offset absence of sight), by improving my four dimension (4D) senses. In perceptual terms, these would be the senses that use reflected light, peripheral movement or displacement (not an exhaustive list) to map the locus of an “object” in space and time (the realm of the non-static, when considered in reductive or progressive expansions, as with a Golden Spiral), which has physical and metaphysical implications. For example, as a basketball player I learned to sense a pass. For a long time I suffered stubbed fingers, but I got better at it. Interestingly, I simultaneously developed a penchant for distributing no-look passes.
The installation array is the facet of my practice where the 4D senses are most apparent. Concept and narrative are revealed as with a hypercube unfolded: through echoes, patterns, disclosures, illustrations, symbols and arrangements. The installation array is the outcome of a production mechanism, which is an open system wedding technologies (scientific, aesthetic, and more), applied to a theme. I choose themes from a pool of shared human experience, beginning with the basics: birth, death, sickness, ritual, conflict, and so on – hence the name of my web nexus: Art for Humans. I introduce specificity, signifying my authorship, through autobiography, which is contextualized with contingent visual elements drawn from witnessed or received history. The array and the production are symbiotic. Images, narrative and media are generated or gathered (production) and interwoven to form an exhibit array. The 4D exhibit is designed conceptually to invite the viewer to enter an animated sphere of conscious expression from a theoretically infinite number of points, or perspectives (though the actual space is usually a white cube). The architecture of space in which the array is housed serves to narrow the viewers’ attention to address critical narrative points. The array of art elements and their inherent content on display or inferred combine to effect an exchange with the viewer, whose interaction with the art is directed to a degree, which degree depends on the conceptual motivation for the particular show. I think of this facet of the artistic process in terms of dance.
My art cantilevers from fact to projected imagination. Photography often acts as a sign for perceived surface realism (signing experiential “fact”) in my work. I started taking pictures with a Nikon 35mm camera twenty-four years ago. I learned how to capture a moment, to stop time, to frame and represent time in print (in 2D). I stopped fretting about representative drawing or painting “chops” by degrees, thanks to the camera. The camera lens became my second eye, and freed my first eye to act as a third eye (as in a no-look pass), the eye of Vision and Context, and Narrative. At the risk of waxing cryptic, the third eye uncovers the fraud of the camera’s lens, indicating limitations of the camera as a definer of reality. The third eye asks: “What lies beyond the edge of the frame?” and “What about movement?” and “Time never really stopped, did it?”
With the help of some pioneering visual pros in the early 90’s, I began trying to answer these third eye questions more expansively with computing tools. My mentors introduced me to software, the Internet, peripherals, platforms and hardware, as well as the presentation media for output of still and moving images. An article (circa ’96) in Wired magazine, in which a digital artist claimed that anyone not making art with computers was not really making art Now, got me worked up enough to compete with him. After my first show created primarily with digital tools (Cowboyz + Cowgirlz), I came to realize that the computer was indeed a viable artist’s tool, but I also was convinced that the Wired artist’s claims were wildly exaggerated. I incorporated the computer into my set of artist tools (like watercolors, charcoals, acrylics, etc.), and slept less.
The GUI and production environments of Photoshop and Painter both relate amazingly well to the studio painter’s, which was the object of the designers. What was (and is still) groundbreaking about these programs was that they directed the user to build images using photographic data, layers, text, translucencies, and shapes in a way that was perfectly consistent with 4D painting methods. The compatibility between these media initiated an ongoing “call and response” dynamic between them, which is expressed in my artistic practice. Although I eventually came to believe that a computer cannot answer the third eye questions above (formally relative to “normal reality” in a fine art context made up of “viewers”), I found that it does allow the artist to map the edges of the 4th Dimension, using powerful mathematical formulas (which I comprehend in only a rudimentary capacity) to suggest the parameters of real time and movement. In a computational field, all information is equalized as numerical data. The human correlate is called “equanimity.” When the information is “Art” it can be viewed on the same plane as all other forms of information relative to the human experience (which is essentially descriptive of everything informational a human being would enter into a computational data field). By definition, all information becomes relative in a numerical data field. This fact makes some people happy and some people mad, though it is my contention that most people in both camps never connect the phenomena.
When the data is output, which is to say, when the equalized data re-enters the stratified field of human consciousness, and once again becomes subject to the hierarchical interpretations of it in unique human minds, a keen observer can begin to learn geometrically about the nature of the human perceptual mechanism, a relatively powerful dimensional activator/receptor. An attentive witness of this phenomenon can explore by their inherent dimensional natures elemental forces such as magnetism, wave and particle dynamics, dynamic symmetries, anomalies, uncertainties, chaos, progressions, evolutions, and so on. My art is the catalyst for such explorations. The 4D installation array is the context for this observational practice, which is fundamentally anecdotal. Whenever I launch a 4D exhibit, I spend copious periods in the gallery observing the behavior of viewers interacting with the artwork for this reason.
Through production, my choice and application of media has been refined by trial and error into effective means to an expressive end. Each media has a role to play in my practice. Painting and drawing have emerged as the best vehicles for me to contend with the immediate relationship between physical reality and inner self. Photography indicates charged surface. The computer serves multiple functions. It animates the photographic (in print) and environmental (through projection). It permits me to break down and reassemble the painted or photographic in facets, components or layers. Further, the computer facilitates integrating audio into the installation array, as exhibit soundtrack, which is the glue holding together a 4D production for the viewer. The audio bed in the space, combined with light, performance and other visceral time-based media, extend my art from the wall and into the viewer’s live moment. In this way my experience as a musical performer, poet, thespian, and set designer contribute to my installation practice. Combined, these media provide the viewer with an encompassing sensory experience, which is the nature of 4D art. My visual art-specific experience as a framer, art handler and preparator obviously helps, too, because (in my opinion) any combinative creative form that does not consider the logistics and tradition of fine art presentation is problematic in a fine art venue.
In my current work, I am weaving media, cultural histories, forms and practices into efficient vehicles for cultural exchange. My New Media and Traditional Western Art forms are integrated into the white cube or alternative substrates/spaces for presentation to a diverse audience whose visual literacy is not fixed or assumed. The object is to produce truly inclusive art, which precisely describes the trajectory of my personal and aesthetic concerns for the scrutinizing viewer, without impinging on the viewer’s own perceptual freedom. I consider this to be the overarching mission to which I aspire as an artist.
I am endeavoring to reduce visual elements to formal placeholders, in anticipation of introducing specific content, which will be determined and fixed later in the run-up to my thesis show. Therefore, I have been focused on the work and criticism of Donald Judd and his contemporaries, especially in relation to viewer interaction with specific (3D) objects in traditional and non-traditional art venues. A corollary to this exploration is the consideration of permanent versus temporary installation of art in contemporary exhibition and sales practices, i.e., Marfa versus Photo LA. In my studio practice this focus has resulted in work that bridges 2D and 3D contemporary painting and sculptural approaches. A series of “pull paintings” meant for presentation in massive grid arrays builds on the concepts and aesthetics of Judd, LeWitt and others. The study and incorporation of the grid, as a formal construct, a decorative element and a reference to social, scientific and mathematical concerns has long been present in my practice. Currently, the grid appears primarily in my digital work in various ways, such as: pixel-basic image formulations; schematic arrays, series and patterns; and formal studies related to the developments first introduced by 3D artists in the 60’s and 70’s. In terms of process, this stage of production involves boiling down the base (form), while shopping for and preparing the ingredients (content), to use a cooking metaphor.
I have also been exploring the phenomenon of interdisciplinary, international creative cultures emerging from internet-based networks such as MySpace, Flickr, Slide, Perpetual Art Machine, Rhizome, You Tube, Revver, 3DSHOP and others. The cultural producers fluidly affiliated with these virtual “tribes” are often impacted or inspired by: street art, or graffiti; surf, skateboard cultural and decorative arts; graphic design, graphic novels and comix; VJ practice for live performance; 3D and wireframe-based animation and modeling techniques; Japanimation and anime; and Abstract Expressionism. One of the most significant developments related to this phenomenon is the establishment of new retail models for the exchange of cultural objects, which must certainly be considered relevant to fine arts practitioners and distributors who are concerned with the empowerment of the artist in the art business (as arena). These retail models successfully rely on both internet-based sales and traditional “brick and mortar” shops cum galleries in tandem, appealing to a younger and more electronically adept demographic. My research of these New Media phenomena is now yielding promising developments in my Art For Humans network of online sites, a precursor to the establishment of a “brick and mortar” multi-use facility and conglomerate of associated venues for exhibition, performance and sales. I am interested in correcting the art market to rectify some trends that reward speculation versus value (e.g., the marginalization of mid-late career practitioners who work in secondary markets). Although my exploration of these phenomena are yielding important fruit for my labor, they relate more directly to the concerns I intend to pursue as an MBA candidate in CGU’s MAACM program. However, I wish to posit here that the redefinition of the artist’s role in the broader cultural/social/financial discourse that I am attempting is certainly reinforced by my predecessors (from Murakami/Warhol to Michelangelo).
My studio practice continues to involve concepts, technical explorations and narratives migrating among media. The narratives are sustained or colored by gesture, romantic or lyric representation, the heroic, as well as sacred art. I am in the process of developing a pictorial strategy for embedding layered, faceted solids, signs for “meaning” signified, in translucent applications of acrylic gel. The visual meme for this project is “the woven form.” If I’m successful with this technique, I will use it to construct a complex narrative cataloguing a fictional protagonist (an Everyman) navigating through LA (from home to work to a show to a restaurant and back home again, to dream) in multimedia. The subtext will be exposure to secondhand media. At the moment, my narrative concerns for this theme (which would be expressed as secondhand media) include: the impact of the last century’s politics on today’s family, especially pertaining to child-parent and man-woman relationships; the semiotics of “the War on Terror;” the current state of Free Speech (and by extension, the public support of the visual arts) in America; water, dirt and air as commodities; mimesis in patterns; games and social competition; urban versus “nature” as a function of memory; the death of a friend; and the fractal-effected portrait, form or landscape as wallpaper/wall dissolver.
My ultimate goal as an artist is to create art objects that last longer than I will, and that are valuable enough as cultural instruments of perceptual evolution to warrant the costs of manufacture and care they require. I seek to fluidly operate as a singular component contributing to the welfare of a sustainable corpus. E Pluribus Unum. 01. To summarize: my art is unified-moving-freestyle-formal in four dimensions now-for-tomorrow-from-yesterday/prose poetry as technical manual; and my hardwiring is tribal.