Creative Work Portfolio
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a multi-media American visual artist whose artwork focuses on the narrative of environment translated and coded into complex psychological landscapes. My strong interest is in visual narratives, created out of symbolic code, or personal syntax, that explore memory as it relates to the construction, negotiation, and interpretation of the sense of self.
I grew up in the southwest border region, living and working in New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. I credit these experiences and that of one of my undergraduate degrees in cultural anthropology for providing a heightened awareness of geographical and political boundaries real or imagined, and a fascination with the exploration of identity of self.
My art practice utilizes technology and multimedia approaches to combine painting, printmaking, projection video mapping, and sound.
My art reflects the connection of my interests of constructions of self with the marriage of technology and science. Specifically connecting quantum physics, string theory, swarm intelligence, and light relationships to create relational artworks and installations.
I strive to create esthetic resonance in our relationships to locality and how we tell the stories about the intersections of meaning within our lives. My installations instill a level of heightened physicality pulling the viewer in another real or imagined world, enabling them to interact and create their own narrative as they experience the environment.
My imagery is illustrated through a series of repeated syntax and narrative codes. The syntax characters are at times literal such as airplanes, maps, and houses and other times they merge into the abstract and surreal. They are consistent visual language, made of one hundred and one characters (and growing) that are articulated through repetition within scale and material applications. These characters articulated on the walls and ceiling are combined with colored light, to create a layer of colored shadows that change as the light changes within the room and within the shadow of the viewer. Light sensitive paint on various artworks reveals their characters with the transformation of day to night light.
Projection mapping onto mylar silhouettes of the same iconography with colored light move and interact with the viewer. While standing in front of the artworks, sound moves in and out ignited by the movement of the viewer, who is also supplied with a small portable black light flashlight to help reveal additional layers of “glow in the dark” painted and silkscreened imagery.
In essence viewers are searching with their own beacons, giving them agency with a tool that reveals more of the story, inviting dialogue and a relationship shift to the art experience. My installations and individual artwork culminate in invitations for participation in an other worldly account of a narrative that the viewer finds themselves making with their own connections, questions, and shared meaning.