The work on view in my thesis exhibition consists of collaged video from self-shot footage. My recent work focuses on the themes of body, action, perspective, experience, and the transient nature of humans. Process is a large part of how I create composition. I use imagery and information and manipulate it in a variety of media, including: drawing, screen-printing, and photography. I enjoy the flux between still art and moving video. This is the area where I process and break down data to pick out texture, tonality, movement, layering, and other elements that I alter and manipulate. This is all part of the process of creating a conceptual exhibition of an ever-changing perspective.
I carefully consider the academic implications of the imagery I use and try to diffuse history, form, and meaning. I draw from philosophers’ reflections such as Aristotle and Nietzsche. Aristotle’s writing on Universals speaks of how Universals are the sameness that simultaneously occurs in all things that share common traits. These commonalities set up a basis of comparison that can be juxtaposed in all things. His writings on tragedy share the universal cue, which is that imitation occurs through human existence, not within people but within their actions. Secondly, Nietzsche’s thoughts on Perspectivism reflect that there is no objective truth about things because of endless and unstable individual perspectives. Both these philosophers speak to my personal art practice because I approach my art making as a scientist and philosopher of the natural occurrences and limitations of the human perspective. My work also reflects on processes in art history from the Futurist and Dada movements, the academic. Work that exhibits repetition, movement, and the notion of making sense out of non-sense to shake up the comfortable view that people have on reality shape and inspire how I make artwork. By doing this as an artist I hope to bring attention to the fact that perspective is subjective and infinitely has potential to be changed, manipulated, and rediscovered.
I am interested in human constructs and systems. My artwork takes things like the concept of a building and power and reinforces its human made nature with a person in action. Humans (or people or living beings) are temporary and transient both physically and conceptually. Therefore, the concept of a person as an individual is a perspective that is temporary due to entropy and time. The rest of the Universe shares the trait of continuum and therefore we are in the sameness with the Universe but we have the ability to observe, abstract, compare, contrast, and construct subjective models of reality.
The combination of human perspective, daily existence, and the academic study of movement build a metaphor for life’s ephemeral nature. This, in turn, sets up the thematic thought process I attend to in this work. For my thesis work, I embraced reference and location in public and private spaces. I am investigating how place affects our ideologies, especially dealing with the maintenance and strength of being an individual while at the same time being part of the system of civil constructs via urban life, government, and the one-on-one relationship. I have visually structured these complexities by moving in and out of compositions, recorded moments, and chance encounters. The video images are seen at varying levels of transparency, which are present and not present at the same time. The video articulates the weirdness that entropy creates in the naturally unstoppable presence of time from our current perspective. As humans we are equipped with a visual vocabulary that is culturally influenced to tell us what symbolic meaning we can find when we perceive things. My artwork revolves around this awakening of intrigue, by searching for the potential and the limitations of perspective within the study of human temporal constructs and culture.
