WRITTEN excerpts ABOUT RESEARCH & WORK

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Exhibition Statement Excerpt

I once spent a month traveling the north and south islands of New Zealand. Along with college course research, I intended to make an experimental film and had completed numerous sketches leading up to the trip. In truth, the many fragmented ideas I had gathered never connected, and I started recording footage without a clear sense of the film. Traveling in a camper van, I gradually woke up earlier each day and heard a riotous cacophony of birds singing before dawn. One song in particular stood out because of its strange melodic nature. I learned this was the song of the Bellbird, and for much of the rest of the trip, I set my alarm so I could make audio recordings of the Bellbird's morning song. These recordings led me to a new idea, and I created an entirely different film than I had initially intended.

I often reach a place on sustained projects where I can no longer remember what propelled me forward in the first place. If the initial idea, the origin remains intact, it was strong enough to stand the test of time as new ideas developed through and around it. If it faded, what visually or sonically came after was much more interesting to me. In the case of the Bellbird audio recordings, they sparked an idea that anchored and carried all the way through to the finished cut of the film.  I think part of the reason for this is because I never fully understood why I was so particularly drawn to them in the first place. I do not want to ever fully understand.   

My work is anchored in narrativity. The desire to merge the pure fleeting beauty of the physical world, with the strange, flawed, disjointed, imaginative interior world of the mind intrigues me to no end, and it is through this union that my work fundamentally comes into being.  

I find it compelling how an image or sound can lodge itself in the subconscious and open up an expansive idea. One image or idea builds and informs another. By inhabiting an expansive idea for a long period of time one can arrive at a place creatively that they could have never otherwise reached. I seek to materialize the ideas which are mysteriously present, ideas that I have made no conscious effort to evoke. I am not interested in forming an idea around a specific concept, meaning, or event, if the idea has depth, interpretations will naturally embed themselves. Ideas triggered in this manner (which are suddenly present without preconceived-coxing) contain the greatest element of mystery at the onset. That which originates from a presumed understanding or with a didactic goal is often void of mystery as it is prodded into existence. Outcomes are often narrow and predictable, even before they are explored. In a sense, everything is over before it even begins. I find work interesting to decipher only after it is finished.

Drawing and painting narrative-based images led to years of writing fiction in order to explore what occurred before and after the frozen static moments, I was capturing in graphite, ink, and paint. I began working with video so that I could incorporate multiple images, motion, time, and sound into the narratives I was creating. Through this progression of mediums, I reached a place where the majority of my ideas no longer fit the nature of the static image. The idea dictated the form it would take and I did not feel bound to any single media. The scope of my work began to include full-scale and miniature set construction, three-dimensional sculpture and prop construction, costume and sound design, and numerous other production aspects associated with filmmaking.

I often work laterally, in a way that each completed work is part of a greater whole. 

I have found the structure of the short film

to be one of the most exciting ways to bridge connections between disparate mediums. 

Landscape is a major influence in my work.

A sense of a place, discarded, unexpected objects, and geographical details, form foundations for imaginative interpretations and narratives to occur.  Memories of past environments, the present environment in which I live, and the landscapes I encounter while traveling, all exert a simultaneous and continuous influence.  

A reoccurring motif (relating to Romanticism in landscape painting) is that of a single individual within a vast exterior landscape or confined to a relatively claustrophobic interior space. 

I am also strongly influenced by the way memory, desire, and belief affect the psyche and the reality that one creates in their environment.

Art is the language that evokes and embodies that which cannot be rationalized or explained

and it is the mysterious, revelatory journey of exploring an idea

that keeps me fascinated and dedicated to the process of creating art.