Artist's Statement



I consider art an expression of information and research. Visual art often concerns issues of visual perception and understanding, but I think art in every medium can address a wide range of subject matters.

I believe the ways in which information or meaning can be expressed may be infinite but that, for any particular meaning, there is only 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 can either liberate or control and confine our thinking. I agree with Keats that truth is beauty. 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.

Issues that have most interested me in the past (and that are still reflected in my work) relate to epistemology and how we define “good” (whether moral or qualitative), among other things. Issues that most interest me currently are how to communicate and implement what I think I figured out. Implementation seems to implicate among other things such “systems” questions as, what principles or other structures tend to help a given system survive, adapt, and reproduce? (I think pretty much anything can be usefully regarded as a “system”--e.g., biological cells, individuals, governments, the universe.)

So long as I am interested in many different perceptual, cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and substantive issues and many different kinds of aesthetic appeal or effect, I plan to let my interests and pleasures dictate the diverse media and forms in which they’re best expressed.