T E A C H I N G     S T A T E M E N T

Risks and failures are encouraged.   Inquiry is the force that propels learning, not instilling doctrine or previous methods.   Learning and teaching are very similar processes; it is in large part the role of the instructor to model a mature artistic practice that is "openly open" but focused.   Purposeful experimentation is valued over repeating a mastered technique.

Historical knowledge informs art-making.   While a traditional history of art is invaluable, students should also be exposed to as wide a range of artistic possibilities as possible, even ones outside the traditional boundaries of art.   For the student, all materials from all disciplines can be useful.   In one's studio practice everything is at once useable: students are asked to process and then push beyond what they have seen.

It is crucial that students, especially those working with media, be more than consumers and creators but also critical and deconstructive.   The responsibility of the student is to be critical of the world around them and understand the responsibility that comes with what they make.

Teaching "new media" must balance technical fluency and innovation with critical art practice, and both of these with traditional skills crucial to artists of all disciplines.   I believe that a learning-by-doing process is most beneficial and allows students to engage in a process that favors experimentation, a way of working that is more likely to yield interesting and unexpected results.   While skills like clean programming and videographic techniques are important, students are expected to engage the technology from a critical, personal, and inventive standpoint from even the most basic assignments.

Writing is a critical skill for artists, and as such my students of all levels are asked to write about what they want to make (in the form of project proposals) and what they have made (artist statements).

Students are not expected to all achieve the same level of competency.   Rather, it is the degree of improvement and commitment to subject matter that marks success.   That said, realistic criticism of their work is necessary and students are accountable for the images and objects they make.

In the end, I ask that my students be thinking and feeling artists.   They are expected to rigorously investigate their world with their technical skills, their intellect and knowledge, and with their emotions; this is at the heart of learning and of making art.



A R T I S T     S T A T E M E N T

The line between narration and conceptual can perhaps be reframed as hallucination and observation.   In writing this, I feel they both apply to each - the narrative comes from imagination while the conceptual affects the real; the narrative is built from the world and the conceptual is a fabricated system superimposed on it. 

My work is a merging of these processes, of being fastidiously present in the world, building systems which from simple starting points create sprawling changes, and re-invigorating the original meaning of "wonderful", full of wonder.

Decisions, events, and observations collide with and drastically alter initial conditions and the process (one of looking, dreaming, graphing, and filtering) though often reductive, produces a work that is focused (observed) but equally peripheral (hallucinated).

Similes, amplification, distillation, and chaotic systems - the process both makes the work and what the work is about.   An emphasis on the systems by which small bits are organized is at once ecological, poetic, and conceptual. Scintillations found in macro experience are amplified within a chaotic system.   Subtle chance variations are made manifest.   This lamination of memory (pre-existing) and the present (changing, forming) is an iridescent, nested framework.