PROCESS STATEMENT
My overarching practice is a spirited “process of acquaintance” with an ecosystem wherein I listen, absorb, participate, and eventually, become. Although this practice can span environmental, human, and organizational dimensions, visual inquiry usually begins grounded in an environmental ecosystem. After initial fieldwork opens conversation, relationship development continues off-site in the studio. Over time and through multiple media, conversations expand, understanding deepens, and I gladly surrender to the familiar inevitability: I am exploring an ever-expanding, multi-dimensional, transitory whole. The task each time, then, is to discern the whole’s particular insights from this shifting, idiosyncratic convergence of this place, this person, and this (construct of) time.
When I begin at a new location (usually an outdoor site that hosts transcontextual research), I first gather preliminary information (historical, scientific, cultural, anecdotal) and spend casual, improvised time there. When I’m ready to more actively engage, I secure a frame stretched with acetate somewhere on site. I then apply fabric, paint, vinyl, marker, and other provisional materials on and around the acetate, engaging in a push/pull experience with the environment. This dialogue activates the acetate as a notational device at least, and at most, a portal into a state of shared consciousness between myself and the “outer” world. Once complete, I photograph through the acetate, creating a hybrid image that confuses spatial assumptions akin to how my own sense of self was disoriented just moments before. I make several of these “integrated photographs” for each location until eventually, I sense James Hillman’s imaginative recognition: by animating the world, it returns to the soul.
Before long, the visual, experiential, and research-based information gathered materially and otherwise from these initial encounters moves from exchange to dialogue. When I transfer the relationship to the studio, I amplify and perpetuate this dialogue using a diversity of media and methods. This allows me to experience the relationship from multiple perspectives. I build collages with disassembled materials from the photographic process: this isolates idiosyncratic colors, shapes, and marks so I can “scan data” for insights. I execute meticulous graphite drawings after the integrated photographs, leaving blank the areas where my own marks were made: this infuses the location’s patterns and forms into my muscle memory and emphasizes the shapes and rhythms of my own interruptions. With mixed media, painting, and installation, I invent vantage points, articulate visual rhymes, and augment sensorial qualities. I place trust in concrete experience, explicit memory, and research as well as in implicit knowledge and imagination. This breaks the on-site experiences free from their physical locations and allows conversations to expand and evolve in the studio through the work. With abstraction and fundamental elements such as color, texture, gesture, weight, and shape, I express and investigate the physical, phenomenological, and sensorial aspects of a transitory, idiosyncratic convergence of myself, place, and time.
The collection of work from a given site composes a team of meaning-seekers, eager to translate what can only be revealed through a continuity of intimate, reciprocal, ongoing participation. In doing so, the goal of acquainting morphs into a reciprocity of consciousness: by animating the soul, it returns to the world…and learns how to be in the world.
