Selected Works

Gen Z

I can remember when it was still PC to go on safari and come back with tusks and trophies. Destruction of the rainforest was an unknown term. We took it for granted that the wildlife we read about in bedtime stories and other tales would be around forever as they were such an important fundamental element of our cultural fabric. Starting in the 60s there was talk of alternate ways of conducting business and conservation - however today most people are unaware of the scope of the current species extinction and its consequences. If the population of the United States, one of the world’s biggest consumers and polluters suddenly decided to conserve and attempt to reverse the extinction juggernaut, there are now other countries that feel entitled to the remaining natural resources that supply a resource-demanding middle class lifestyle

Gen Z is a series of photographs that combine images of “gen z” children (who follow behind gen x and gen y contingents) with lists of endangered species. Generation z, generation alpha, millenniums, homeland generation - these are terms given to the group born somewhere in the early or mid 2000s. In their lifetimes they will face extreme species and wilderness loss, and environmental damage control will be a hot button issue as it impacts the global economy.

For Gen Z, theme parks and DNA banks will replace wilderness. These children will grow up in an environment of calls to action and red lists, announcements of species extinction and hopefully, this will all be balanced by some victories or breakthroughs in energy use and conservation.
An image of a child requires no translation from culture to culture and invokes an instinctual nurturing/protective response. The superimposition of text invites a closer look. The size of the endangered species list and its contents becomes the stage, backdrop, psychological environment for the young humans who will inherit our legacy.

Scale: The images you see here are 20 x 30", however the succesfull execution would be mural or billboard sized

New Orleans
San Diego
Florence
Tijuana
Coast
Diamond Age
My Ebay

Snowcrash

Work ranges from investigations of ideas of limited space to cataloging of macro and micro environments. I’ve previously worked with organizing and presenting complex sets of data. My depictions of crowd scenes became more personal when I returned to my hometown of San Diego in 2003, where already expensive real estate increases in value daily, traffic is congested, neighborhoods are bursting at the seams, and different cultures and lifestyles are the rule and not the exception.

Prints serve a dual purpose of portraying a population of images in a print area, and the literal depiction of populations and crowd scenes. Formal devices for the organization of small multiples range from vistas to flatland, from panoramas to page spreads. They consist of thousands of photographs, primarily of people, taken in specific locations. I also work with images of consumer culture. These are obtained through web searches, scans, and my own photographs. I think of them as cultural portraits and visually percussive formal arrangements. The process involves shooting over 200 photographs a day, for several weeks in various locations. It incorporates a kind of performance as I take on the role of the photographer/hunter, potentially invading personal space or engaged in some voyeuristic activity. I’m aware as I put the images together of the balance between traditional ideas of pristine digital graphic techniques versus the painterly aesthetic, allowing digital rips and loose extractions equating to drips and gesture in the painter's world, and the obsessive activity of cutting, pasting, reducing and combining hundreds or thousands of images together, often without a formula, allowing for redirections and changes.

The location series is subtitled Snowcrash, which is the title of a book by author Neal Stephenson. In it he describes a virus that has the ability to infect people in virtual environments. I have loosely interpreted the term, using it in my own descriptive context of large masses of humans, cement paved virtual spaces, and culturally transmitted codes of consumption.

Other works have dealt with wide-ranging interpretations of portraiture and landscape using photography, video and audio, digital media, and installation. My background as a painter influences the way I work with technology. It is a process bounded by self-imposed time and media limitations and remains open to unexpected developments. In my studio works often it was the unintentional drips, the under-painting or a subtractive process that resolved the image. Digital technology and installation were natural evolutionary steps, promoting accident, chance and coincidence. Elements are easily rearranged, stacked, erased, enlarged, suspended, and ordered.

The work explores this aspect of art making, driven by a combination of curiosity about potentialities and results, a delight in invention, and marriage of aesthetics and practicality

Spaces (coast)

The spaces I live in are defined by population and environment, culture and government. Within them economic and natural prosperity and disaster cycles ebb and flow like the crowds they affect.
The prints collect, organize and ultimately catalog the photographs of people I take in the malls, festivals, boardwalks, city streets that comprise my living spaces. They reveal the universal and unique human gestures, the homogenous nature of contemporary style, and the effects of the times.

Lately these cultural portraits have deviated from strict formal compositions. Instead of ordered stacks and lines the crowds are deconstructed, moved, pasted and maneuvered until they fit into a new, more intuitive arrangement. In Coast the population is pushed up against the silhouette of California - that’s the way it feels on the boardwalk in summertime at the edge of the continent. In New Orleans the figures (shot at jazz fest, around the different parishes, in the french quarter) float in a sea of camouflage colored puddles that started flooding unconsciously into the piece after Katrina.

These works attempt to be greater than the sum of their parts, combining pattern and people, maps and characters into a hybrid form appreciated on multiple formal and conceptual levels. Any political or cultural critique is entirely unintentional or subservient to the process of making. When issues of gender, age, disability, poverty and wealth emerge in the groups, they are noted, noticed, and delegated to their spot. There are no stars, only a cast of thousands.

Technical Statement

Photographs were taken using an old Canon 3 megapixel G1. The people were cut out and placed in an initial holding canvas, and then transferred to the main grid. Canvas sizes are 30 x 92”, 150 dpi. FIle sizes range from several hundred meg to a gig or more. I currently work on a g5 dual processor Mac with 2 gig of RAM and 3 160 gig hard drives.

Friends

Video/Installation, Juried, Victory Plaza, Dallas Texas 2 minutes looped. 2007

Victory Plaza Exhibition Space: A large-scale, outdoor, digital art gallery at Victory Park, Dallas. Designed by architect, Richard Orne, Victory Plaza hosts eleven Barco LED screens, eight of which are 15'x26' and on movable tracks. Victory Media Network, a 16 hour/day fine art gallery, will be launched at the beginning of November 2007, and we have recently begun accepting digital art submissions of all kinds.

2 proposals

1. An eye gazes over the plaza and crowd. Stylistically it is heavily filtered using exposure and vintage film effects. Periodically ambiguous phrases appear: "Your friends are listening" "Friends don't keep secrets" "Good morning (: "

click here to view beta version 1 (allow the movie to load, and then play)

2. An eye gazes over the plaza and crowd. It is unfiltered, straightforward. (Click on image to the left)

Both of these proposals reference the recent news of government eavesdropping. But they are meant to be open ended enough to also embrace other ideas. I was thinking as well of "history is watching", the ubiquitous security monitor, your preferred omniscient being, and the atmosphere of voyeurism that has become so prevalent in podcasting and myspace.com.

The filtered piece has a general (non-art school) audience in mind. Effects can be problematic, cliche, over-used. I usually steer my students away from them. But rules are made to be broken. The vintage look has become a contemporary icon, seen in recent Starbucks ads, distressed jeans. It is meant to entertain. I use filters here as off-the-shelf vanilla effects, purposely embracing a commercial and commonplace pop art sensibility.

The close up eye has been used extensively in art, from Salvador Dali to Tony Oursler. In the past I have seen them in galleries and train station installations in the US and Europe. What makes this version different and contemporary are the times, our wartime context. Friends are watching us.

Digital bibliography http://www.areaofdesign.com/inthespotlight/victory.htm

Ant Farm 2/2000

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Solo Exhibition/Installation
Contemporary Art Center Feb 2 - 27 2000 New Orleans, LA

Antfarm was an opportunity to combine several pieces I had been working on into one installation at the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center. For three months I shredded all correspondence I received, and stored it in various-sized plastic bags. This was hung, pod-like, from the ceiling. The floor was covered with twenty monitors displaying close-up video of leaf-cutter ants I had taped in Costa Rica. The audio was a low-level hum of pigs feeding, speeded up to an ant-like pitch. On facing walls were two telephone handsets playing underground music downloaded from the Internet. On one wall were portraits of five men wearing swimming goggles. Dominating them was a larger portrait of a heavily made-up woman wearing a headset. I wanted indirect references to relationships between human and ant behavior without any literal conclusions.

Convoy

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Solo Exhibition/Installation
UNO Fine Arts Gallery Aug 21 - Sept 8 2000 New Orleans, LA

With this installation I wanted to work primarily with objects and images that I collected during a trip through the southwest and California. It would deal with travel, migration, and exodus, as well as contemporary graphics, advertising, and pop culture. I set the following parameters/objectives:

Videotape the terrain at foot level as if the camera were attached to the front of a small vehicle.
Create a convoy of collected action figures and miniature vehicles.
Each day the convoy will travel in increments across the floor of the gallery.
Convert the space into a reconstructed/deconstructed landscape through the use of large graphics referencing billboards and menus, pools representing bodies of water/seas/lakes, entry/exit portals representing the convoy’s origin and destination
Pro-wrestler action figures will perform a 360 spiral on skateboards over the pool after emerging from the desert landscape, spinning, landing briefly, and bouncing up to continue their exodus into the southern desert.
Each meal will be photographed/documented for the duration of the trip from New Orleans to the West Coast and back

Communion

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Detail, Well (video)

New Orleans Contemporary Art Center

NO LA 1999

Communion (Video Tower)

The Opening, Juried/Competition

Oculus Gallery 9.11-10.25 1998

Baton Rouge LA

Communion, an installation designed for a glassed-in corner space at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans was developed around extensions of the X, Y, and Z-axis. A line of twelve horizontally placed photographs of headless figures (X) leads to the verticality of a video tower (Y). The monitors displayed the heads and faces of the participants feeding one another water using their mouths. A single monitor on the floor displayed a line of figures submerging their heads in an aquarium and breathing though a snorkel (Z). The audio was of dripping water and one person breathing. Communion was an electronic analog of fountains found in urban areas throughout the world. It was also a document of the performances and personalities of the individuals participating in the odd gestures of nurturing one another with mouth

I’d been thinking about oasis, sanctuaries, places of refuge and renewal, hot springs in Guadalupe Canyon Mexico, Caliente, Ortega, Esalon in California, Southern Chile, the Samoan reefs; the California and Baja beaches. Mental and emotional states; islands of thought, daydreams, sensuous escapes from urban environments, interior psychological experienced-every-day analogs to those exotic distant locals. Water, lakes, oceans and seas. Fountains, how they appear in various forms in cities all over the world. I began to design work for urban spaces which could reference these things. I was inspired for the video stack when someone fed me sips of cold water on a hot day from their mouth to mine, a nurturing, elemental gesture. I have left the footage rough with drips from noses and mouths and the awkwardness and learning curves of catching and releasing. I want the tiny narratives of each person and the serendipity of links when they happen. The single monitor aqaurium piece depicts a line of people, presented to the viewer horizontally, one by one, in contrast to the verticality of the video stack. The snorklers immerse themselves into an environment where air is the precious, unifying resource. I work with heads in the videos. The photographs of the bodies of the participants were taken after videotaping, in the dark, using flash, unposed. About twenty people were taped in New Orleans and San Diego, California over the past year. The angle iron is maritime industrial zinc plated, designed for ships at sea.

LAB

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Solo Exhibition/Installation, Raum 23 Installation Space, Aug 4 - 10 1999 Innsbruck, Austria

LAB was created for an installation space in downtown Innsbruck Austria that resembled a dungeon with its cold, windowless, underground chambers. The subterranean ambience was enhanced with the audio of dripping water and magnetometer recordings transmitted by the spacecraft Voyager. The entryway was lined with life-size plots of headless torsos. Monitors displayed people plunging their heads into aquariums. A single head on a 7' pedestal blew bubbles in slow motion the size of its own head, and two torsos covering each other in white as tornadoes converged. It referenced experimentation in laboratories, odd science, magic and ritual.