Artist Statement

    My work is fundamentally a study into the correlation of the individual agent and organizational systems. The question of what substantiates being has long been a philosophical inquiry but the proliferation of a digitally networked culture now demands significant reappraisal of the metaphysical subject. Participating in communication (electronic or otherwise) decentralizes interiority as language has the tendency to rearrange cognition, shaping sensation and knowledge into the exterior mechanics of semiotics. This condition is only intensified within contemporary media landscapes, these vast immersive environments of information, signals, channels, and noise.
    As a form of response to this paradigm, my work revolves around the dialectical relationship of self and system and how these two entities synthesize with or repel one another. This is a foray into true experience and its mediated counterpart, magical existences in and through machines, an affect bred through technology and the emergence of a cybernetic hero.
    Generative and algorithmic systems guide my process of making and, in so doing, decentralize myself as the central authorial voice in the work. And yet the physical and conceptual material these codes operate upon is of a romanticized and personal nature: the death of cultural icons, photographs of dear friends, a yearning for transcendental moments of spiritual insight. Through concerns of material and process, my work represents the oscillation between the desire for a true affective experience of aesthetics and the media saturated reality we occupy that is always thieving us of the subjectivity predicating any such experience.
    Lately I have taken a great interest in the way pop culture mimics contemporary art and vice versa. These two fields of culture seem to have always influenced one another, at times even hybridizing into one entity that cannot entirely be placed in one category or the other. I am interested in exploring this phenomenon through art and critical writing by creating a kind of aesthetic and intellectual topology of the mimesis that is always occurring between popular culture and current trends in artistic practices.



Wrote the first two paragraphs a few months ago and have been using it as the statement on my website since then. Second two I wrote recently to try to expand on questions of material, process, and where I'm going next.