Artist Statement

Artist Statement

I am another kind of storyteller, one that reads visual information for it's gestural content and cultural worth. I often play with imagery that emphasizes the performative nature of human presence, experience, interaction, and bodily representation. In making my work I am most interested in collapsing everyday distances between subjects and viewers.

As part of my studio process, I often stage performances or break apart graphics, film, video, and photography to reduce aspects of gesture into elements of visual semiotics, capable of articulating familiarity with widespread audiences.

Current Projects

I'm currently working on etchings and drawings for a fall exhibition at the Pump House, La Crosse, WI. The exhibition titled, 'Within/Without,' includes a collection of drawings and prints made in collaboration artists from around the world. The images, namely landscapes, are derived from cell phone exchanges documenting place and the intimate visual dialogue between producer and viewer.

Other recent projects include, “Spaces of Consumption” includes works such as “Intake,” “Pac-Man Ate My House,” and “A Lot to Lose.” The project is a series based on the idea that public stories are affected by the confines of commercialism. The series contains illustrative drawings that work to editorialize the housing boom and collapse as problematic aspects of consumerism and graphic identity within our contemporary social landscape.

My last large-scale project was an exploration of social spaces and the cultural structures and conditions that frame them. The installed work titled, “Spaces of Social Lo-fi, Inside Out,” contained nuances of social governance and human presence framed by interactions between public spaces and the bodily nature of participants. The work invited participants to be the producers of their own affect and meaning within the context of experiential art. The installation operated within two specific architectural sites, in and outside of a gallery space. The outside site consisted of a forced projection of auditory social noise played through an installed trumpet speaker directly behind an installed bench.

The other site was an installed bench within the gallery, positioned directly in front of a surveillance system monitor. Four cameras were installed in different places within the gallery space feeding real-time recordings onto the monitor. Each camera was triggered by motion detection and captured brief snapshots of human movement within each recordable space. One of the four cameras was installed directly above the bench in the gallery, causing a disruption in monitor activity as viewers approached to see themselves from an obscure position directly overhead.

Bio

I was born in 1973, and raised in the Twin Cities. I was the first generation “off the farm” on both sides of my family. My father was a farmer turned commercial/graphic artist at a large packaging corporation in Minneapolis. I grew up watching him draw color separations for consumables like ketchup, candy, dog food, and hair products. Because of this, I developed a rather informed perspective for the commercial qualities of daily and visual information. As I developed as a student of art and artist, my interest shifted to the semiotic (language-based) nature of imagery and how it works to record history, culture, and representations of the body.

I often use elements of performance, photography, video, and the internet as part of my process in creating imagery. Part of this process includes a certain amount of play in regard to the history and gestures found within etchings, photography, film, and gendered imagery. You could say I am most interested in what compositions of the body collectively tell us... without the use of words.