FAQs
I don’t get it.
Don’t get what? What don’t you get?
If you are referring to my artwork and feel like you’re supposed to get some deep, profound meaning from it—but you don’t—that’s okay. None of what I do has any predisposed meaning you’re “supposed” to get. I would never do such thing! As an artist, I would never force an outcome or predetermine meaning from the viewer in any way. Doing so would not only rob you, the viewer, of the experience, but also take away the journey of getting there.
If you feel like you don’t get it, it’s ‘cause you’re in your head. Get into your heart. Instead of thinking about what you’re supposed to be thinking—if I have any intent whatsoever—I want you to feel whatever it is you’re feeling.
The sparsity and seemingly extreme minimalism can be alarming to some. Seeing only one or two objects on a white piece of fabric, messily painted in the same color, and wonder what they are missing. I like my artwork to be strikingly simple, almost alarmingly so. Arresting. That’s the point.
I guess I also want to get you to stop. Stop what you are doing and ask yourself something, anything. Even if it’s just, What am I supposed to be looking at? In a way I want my work to be a void, a pause, a black hole if you will in an otherwise busy world. A moment in which everything else stops, quiets. While the world still goes on around you in just the same way it did a minute ago, suddenly you feel like the perfectly still center of a world spinning round in perfect order, perfect chaos, perfect whiten noise. Only you, you are quiet, you are perfect, you are still. You are okay.
Why is your work so simple?
They say we as modern humans consume more stimuli in ten minutes than a previous human would have in an entire day 100 years ago. We are absolutely inundated with stimuli all day long, good, bad, ugly, and indifferent. That’s a lot of cortisol for a brain that still thinks we are being chased by tigers. A lot of running for our lives. We really do have caveman brains still. Noah Yuval Harari says in his book Sapiens, something like an autopsy done on one of us versus one done on the last iteration of sapien, would yield no anomalies. We are identical to our brethren roaming the earth, living under the sun and moon, that lived millennia ago.
My work is so simple because we are seemingly attacked by stimuli all day long and we need a respite from that. I do at least. I need to be reminded to breath. To stop and check in. How do I feel? I want my work to be that opportunity. It is true sometimes we don’t like what we feel, but we need to feel it to heal it. And healing it is our main function on this earth, besides having babies.
Do you alter your objects in any way?
I’m glad you asked. No I don’t. Doing so would be against my religion. In high school and college I took black and white photography classes and learned the art of capturing the moment. Not altering it or even creating it, just capturing it. Having the eye to see beauty in the mundane. My favorite type of photography is candid group portraiture—interactions.
At this time I was also working heavily in clay and doing atmospheric firings in college. That is when you add types of salt and soda to a gas firing, or wood ash to a wood firing. Either way, you are forced to totally let go of the outcome. There is some play there, but you mostly just have to let go. In ceramics in general, where you’re working with such a natural material that goes through such a profound alteration in the firing process, you are bound to get cracks, slumps, and all matter of other things that ruin a piece.
These two processes lead me right into found object because I had to learn those concepts first before developing the appreciation for true found object. I do not alter any pieces and doing so would be against my religion because I believe that the sun and wind and water and human imprints do plenty. Why would I go in and, with my feeble human mind, think that my stamp would somehow be superior.
All I can do is my best to showcase and broadcast the found object’s inherent beauty. I am heralding it, plucking it from the mud in some cases, and declaring it beautiful just because it IS. Because it survived. And it IS beautiful. Beauty is everywhere. Like Love, there is more enough beauty to go around. Beauty does not have to be pretty or even pleasing. Beauty is equal parts pleasure and pain. It’s the fine line, that razor’s edge as Bob Dylan says.