BIOGRAPHY is over on this page.
STATEMENT
I begin with a simple motive to add to the beauty in the world, and not to the disgraces. I felt an intrinsic pull into the arts from a young age and pursued several disciplines. Growing up surrounded by nature landscape and sounds, my imagination and senses were trained to rhythms in perceptions. The ways arts create knowledge focused my perception interests through proprioception and chronoception. Relating these aspects of perception to elemental wisdom, helps me make aesthetic and material choices.
The defining characteristics of what knowledge and reason are and do have pointed towards a few theories: histories happen on purpose, the metaphysical and material are related and the divide a myth, and the invisible senses of places make people.
As human life continues to morph through technologies and sciences, I noticed the effects of social policies of individualism forming separations. By focusing on a crusted layer of ideas, the deeper wells fed by forms of heartfelt beauty birthed crisis of psyche and emotion. Through the lens, literally, historically, philosophically and psychologically, epistemologies became the way I could give structure to chronoception and proprioception to create multi-media installations involving vision and body.
In understanding psyche means spirit, the deployment of social policies through systems of thought exposed a covert conflict tactic. I personally maintain virtues and principles endure longer than emotions and ideas. While ideas and emotions employ an analytical and systemic approach, I worked to find ways to champion interests in traditions and rituals in service to healthy maturation of knowing. By working with embodied functions, I noticed the ways social policies morphed behaviours to create detrimental patterns. While bettering material conditions improves the appearance of life, the qualities of life that illuminate the mind from the beauty in the heart are where I work from, with, and toward. Therefore the nearly universal experiences of the sublime in awe and reverie, invited me to bring more value to the elemental wisdom in nature.
We become what we practice and develop where focus is laid. Therefore the Vision-Body relationship brought my work with cameras and poetry into the realm of the senses, the tactile and performed. The research of Elaine Scarry and Robert Sapowlsky gives words to what I believe people have awareness of deep within their bones.
Seeing the body as the generative force in cognition takes up a biological way of reasoning. Biology already being physical, informs materials and perception. This bottom-up perspective often confronts the top-down route (ideology). The bottom-up understanding affords greater agency in creating beauty and harmony as mother nature ultimately runs this show regardless of ideological understandings or misunderstandings. An ideologically driven or bottom-down motive has merit as well, though as defined clearly in Hito Stereyl’s work, a favoured mode of psychological warfare.
In a world mitigated by telematic interfaces, I persist in making art because of its unique ability to work on subtle layers of culture. While culturally antagonistic trends in art continue, I work to serve those seeking vitality, beauty, healing, harmony, and truths. Since truth is a touchy word, here’s an example: a notion humans are born and leave alone denies the reality there are usually a mother and father and supporting group of people involved in various capacities throughout the process. The notion of aloneness pervades social policies deployed in subtle and persistent methods through media, professionals, and often culture. Therefore, art’s purpose and place in creating knowledge stronger than ideas, can nurture the psyche with truths, that water the heart with beauty.
After years of wrestling with images and questions with free-will, determinism, subjectivity, and agency, I saw an entry point through technology and sciences to reorient my visual work materially and performatively in joining images, magnetic resonances, performance, and textiles. The project has a working title of Magnetics In-Material and serves to create a common ground for people who live in places and can relate with each other through seeing and sensing tactilely, the invisible and eminent energies of elements.