My work is most recently informed by the excellent instruction in design school at UW Stout. Some of the works in this collection arose directly from course work, while others developed in my personal practice alongside my course work.
The workflow of the former consists of writing, sketching, and making based on some starting vision of what I think I would like the object to be or do. Often that initial vision is lost in the work as the object develops. The flow of my personal works usually follows a different sequence: I visualize some object, I attempt to make it, and in the process build the meaning of the object for myself.
One of the ideas I am currently most interested in is the formation of meaning through the mind’s symbolic experience of its environment, the world, others, and reality. The way that I am most interested in approaching thais idea is through symbolic expression in art. My experience of the world is unique to me, and I have a compulsion to express that experience.
For much of the time I have been a practicing artist this has meant the investigation of self to object and object to object interactions in the world. I poke at my (our) obsession with materials and compulsion to make. I think about dreams and meditative states. I am interested in our sense of the uncanny and fascinated by insanity and other distortions of subjective experience.
My work is an approach to trauma of all kinds. Not only the explicit trauma of abuse and violence, but also the basic trauma of being a communicating, sentient being which language ultimately fails. I am interested in language, the psychological structures of language and the nature of trying to share the inside of one’s mind through symbolization.
Central Valley is a metaphorical place for exploring these ideas. It was conceived several years ago as the fictional locale of a photography project. It is an obvious metaphor for the Wisconsin River Valley of my childhood as well the Mississippi River Valley of my adulthood. More generally it also stands for the valleys in consciousness that dreams, meditation, and trance states occupy. Much of my work comes out of those valleys in thought where the unconscious and consciousness meet and intermingle.
Many of my works have vague stories outlined in my mind. The characters in those stories become the imaginary inhabitants of Central Valley. Central Valley is a place with few real inhabitants, if even more than the one. It is probably (post)apocalyptic. It is a dark place, but also beautiful and interesting.
I can only make the claim that any other artist can make: this is the work that I am compelled to make and now I am showing it to others.