ARTIST STATEMENT
2021
THE FEELING OF TIME
Sometimes the pieces I create tell a story, more often they exist inside the context of one. I have a tendency to take on work of significant complexity and technical difficulty, and love to incorporate gradients of color, size, or meaning (these tendencies are quite prevalent within my personal life as well as in my work). This stems from my my own insatiable desire to exert control; to exist within an organized system. Instability is both inevitable and fundamental, and it seems to occupy the core of almost everything we do. Every system humanity has set up is a representation of this: our attempts to control, even briefly, that which is uncontrollable.
Within my work, the concept of stability as it relates to the passage of time is almost always my subject. I am interested in time as a force: its overwhelming power and complete lack of emotion. It is the feeling of time; stretching back behind you, and out in front, an infinite distance in either direction, that I ultimately wish to convey.
To me, there is nothing more beautiful than our insignificance, our transient frailty; nothing more inspiring than Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ or the Hubble Deep Field images. To be so small and so fleeting adds an urgency and a poignancy to our existence that affects every one of us, even if we don’t ever consciously consider it. Our need to create, to accomplish, to change the world we live in, seems to me to stem directly from the fact that we have so little time. Without the certainty of death, so much of what we care about would be meaningless.
So time is important, precious, but it is also pernicious. This contradiction is so fundamental to the human experience that perhaps it’s no surprise we often behave so poorly. We are conflicted creatures. We each deal with this differently; each to our own coping mechanism. Through my work, I spend my life trying to organize my way out of death, and into a sense of control. We all wish to be constant, to truly be as real and permanent as we feel, all alone inside our own heads, each of us a whole universe.