ARTIST STATEMENT

Perception of personal reality is inexorably linked to our ability to recognize, express, and name what we are seeing. Our ability to express and communicate what we are experiencing is fundamentally dependant upon the visual and verbal tools that we have at our disposal. Art is an experiential act and process of seeing, and provides meaning and context that is delivered through the interchange of a visceral knowledge transmission. My use of collage and pastiche to enter visual dream-like realms enable these images to facilitate an inner dialogue that springs from the roots of our individual experience. Working in a digital 3-D environment is recognition of the elusive and illusory nature of our own private sense of reality, a reality that is open to free association and multiple interpretation. These images, although rooted in the commonalities of our individual languages point towards a deeper more visceral understanding of complex thought on a purely visual, imagistic level. The interaction between the image and our thoughts about it and the visual language we are anchored in combine to have a profound effect on the transmission and understanding of the image content. My art is defined by process, a hybrid of the essential elements of painting, photography and writing. The process begins with the acquisition and journaling of personal data and an abstract schema that becomes a pastiche of personal writing, instantiated as a new private language - part sign, part symbol and part non sequitur. The image surface becomes a non-navigational road map of fragmented and disassembled narratives, disruptive and de-centering yet at the same time oddly imbued with an inner, familiar, and abstracted order. These digitally rendered images are multi-disciplinary, cross genre visual/poetic objects that are modeled in a three-dimensional virtual environment and texture mapped using real world photographs, found image, and various source texts. The language these images root us in is at once pure conception and simultaneously notes from the realm of dreams. The process is the art; the act of dissecting the poetic formulates the poetry. I have chosen to work in a digitized 3-D world that is normally used to render models for use in computer-generated imagery. This work space affords me the opportunity to immerse text and image in its own universe and divest them of any semblance of intrinsic meaning, re-order them, truncate them in an act of creating a different form of dialogue with the viewer, a new implicit narrative composed with a post-literate asemic language that is understood at once through creative intuition and rooted in our collective unconscious.