Artist Statement

I am a is a visual artist whose work spans many different fields, with a perspective that comes from an interest in anthropology, contemporary media, and social change.

The most recent work comes from mapping of neighborhoods and architectural sites from a long historical perspective, and then using a variety of strategies including text and video collage to explicate relationships between past and present.

My parents are academics and I lived for a time in Ghana, Africa; Venezuela, and Malaysia, as well as a number of communities in the U.S. This led me to a passion for cultural anthropology which I studied in college. I’ve often taken issues of cultural understanding as a launching point in creating work.

Much of it involves low technology, simple basic materials, as well as light and shadow. In tandem with this I’ve pursued an exploration of how high tech materials and mediums can be used to express basic visual and cultural ideas.

Past work includes fashion related art made from a wide variety of everyday materials and products. Everything from plastic table cloths, to bed spreads, to children’s jump ropes. The idea is to explore the grace inherent in these materials through the medium of fashion, and to put forward a new set of questions about the notion of “beauty” by juxtaposing the origins of the materials with qualities in the finished forms.

Past computer art work includes stripped back, minimalist virtual worlds, focusing on fundamental aspects of Western visual representation and digital technology and can played almost like video games, but may also be viewed as a sort of critique of Western visualization.

The live video performance art involves a kind of real time mining of visual data out of a host of simultaneous inputs including live video cameras, prerecorded tape and computers. It combines the collaborative and improvisatory aspects of performative work with a focus on color and structure as higher level elements of content. A kind of revaluing of visual meanings.