Artist's Statement

There is an intangible thread that relentlessly appears in my work.  It manifests itself in a variety of ways, and appears as themes, motifs and repeating symbols.  This largely unconscious vision, which lies as the force behind my work as an artist, finds its way into a variety of narrative and semi-narrative projects. The vision appears regardless of my intensions. It manifests itself in my obsession with science, my interest in natural forms and my love for art history.  While sometimes inexplicable or difficult to articulate, this vision or viewpoint informs my style, my themes and my methodology.  It is pervasive.  Through making art, I reveal my own inner desires and visions to myself.  And in this sense I am making work as a way of understanding myself as much as I am working as a means of communicating with an audience.

I am constantly seeking new methods of creating moving images.  I am interested in re-coding moving images, in looking for ways to work outside conventional narrative forms.  Perhaps my interest in this approach comes from my background in painting and sculpture.  Filmmaking is not usually considered a handmade medium, but rather a process of capturing reenacted realities through technology. 

The physical medium of filmmaking has great potential as a handmade process.  I imagine the works of Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Cornell, Cezanne, Matisse, and Chagall suddenly in movement.  I want to somehow speed up the drawn and painted image, as William Kentridge does, or slow down the film image as if to paint with it as Tarkovsky does.  

I love how Andy Goldsworthy both creates and documents with the photographs of his transfigured natural forms.  I approach my films in a similar fashion, conscious of the process as both creation and documentation.  I am interested in looking through the film camera with the same kind of stillness one might dedicate to the painted image.

As our culture participates more and more in mediated experience (McLuhan’s “outtering of the senses”), a cultural need arises for artistic expressions of this experience.  Just as science pushes into new realms of physical, biological, even psychological possibilities, art pushes the boundaries of the way we look, listen and experience. 

I am looking for expressions of this new experience, an experience brought about by the rapid changes in technology, innovations in science, the shrinking of wilderness, and increasing cultural discrepancies.