Artist's Statement


“[F]or several virtues/ [h]ave I liked several women . . . .”

-- The Tempest, Act III, scene i, lines 42-43,
The Riverside Shakespeare (2d ed. 1997, Houghton Mifflin)


I see art as a mode of research, cognition, and expression about ourselves and our world. I believe the ways in which information or meaning can be understood or expressed may be infinite but that, for any particular meaning, there is just one unique, optimal articulation (and in one particular medium or selection of media). As a corollary, I believe form equals content (but that is not to say all meanings and effects of a work are apparent at first glance).

I agree with Homer that art is a sword with two edges: it both deceives and reveals, and it simultaneously both empowers and confines our thinking. I don't believe in a singular, absolute truth, but I believe that some working hypotheses seem to have greater predictive power than others, at least within certain contexts. Subject to the foregoing, I agree with Keats that truth is beauty. I learned from Milton that meaning resides in relatedness. I also accept the tenet of information theory that the most important data are those that would not have been predicted.

I like art that has lots of meaning on more than one level, that has multiplicitous intentions, that deploys more than one strategy, or that juxtaposes more than one frame of mind. And I like art that shows or does something new. I also like art that addresses aspects of life that are challenging or difficult, whether emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise.

While it often takes considerable effort to gain an understanding of possible answers to our big-picture questions, I believe that many can be found in our museums and libraries. Even with possible answers in hand, however, it's a challenge is to figure out how to apply them within the ever-changing variety of conditions we face. I believe artists work to try to help understand and meet that challenge, in ways that are non-judgmental and (directly or indirectly) alluring.

While I've long been especially interested in video, my work incorporates a wide array of media and strategies, including relational strategies, curation, and documentation.

I often do a lot of research and conscious cogitation in preparation for a project. That said, many works spring more or less "whole" from a dream or vision, often imagined in great detail. These seem to embody much of what I think I've learned in life, although I often don’t understand all I was doing until some time after the work was completed.

In the past, I've been interested in a number of issues – perception and cognition; individual identity and motivation; how we define "good" (whether moral or qualitative); social, economic, and political interactions and complicities within systems large and small; transformation and mortality, among others.

I've also been interested in considering various subsets of reality as systems (I think pretty much anything can be usefully regarded as a “system” – e.g., biological cells, individual psyches, nations, ecologies, concrete or abstract systems such as languages or computers, the universe.) What organizing principles or other conditions tend to help a given system survive, adapt, reproduce?

In recent years, I've more explicitly explored ways of blending "art" and "reality," regarding the latter as both art medium and art object and exploring the meanings of and relations among various physical and virtual dimensions.