Snowcrash

New Orleans
San Diego
Florence
Tijuana
Coast
Diamond Age
My Ebay

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) Statement

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 was working on a g5 dual processor Mac with 2 gig of RAM and 3 160 gig hard drives.