Artist Statement
2008
Emerging technology evokes anxiety and hope, often at once. My work reflects and explores this tension in a variety of media, testing ways of representing a technologically informed experience.
Currently I'm working on a series of paintings and drawings which derive from software interpretation. These works are based upon photographs of Chinese scholar's rocks and Japanese Zen gardens. I'm passing these Buddhist forms of landscape, which I discovered through documents, through a contemporary painting technique -- into something else, perhaps in-between cultures, locations, times. Much of the texture and detail in these pieces derives from computational misinterpretation of information within each image.
Preceding this work, I've experimented with environmental wall paintings generated from an obsolete computer-modelling program. I've also made sculpture which transforms a flat image into a three-dimensional object by stacking layers of foam paneling. What first appears as an abstract sculpture is in fact generated by a representation. Only from a precise point of view does a viewer see the source image, optically collapsing three dimensions back into two. These include a group of sculptures of humanoid robots, a series of medicalized paradoxes, and other scenes.
My artistic process is both about technology and is itself a technology. Through software filters and construction algorithms, pseudo-mythic or iconic representation is put into play, archived and renewed. The work relates to its source or original, attempts a return to origins, but differently.