Artist Statement

Artist Statement

Stripped to its skeleton, my work is about the difference between truth and reality. I think of reality as everything that exists, with or without human observation. I think of truth as the ways humans interpret reality.

The flesh of my work — what I address directly — is how truth and reality relate to human conflict. People naturally, it seems, want their own definitions of truth to be universally accepted as the definitions of reality. These competing definitions — all equivalent insofar as they are interpretations of reality — are the origins of human conflict. From bullying to hegemony to conquest to genocide, humans hurt and destroy each other to gain dominion for their own truth.

Materials used in my work represent both reality and interpretation: natural materials like earth, minerals, water and vegetation are the basic elements of the physical world, created without the aid or craft of people; man-made materials like paint, glue, fertilizer, metal, video and recorded sound represent our crafting and reshaping of reality. I want my work to both mimic reality — the untouched lithosphere, biosphere and atmosphere — and convey the liminal realm of truth — ambiguous, debatable and subject to manipulation.