My work spans a number of disciplines but is unified by an overarching interest in language. My art circumspectly explores the phenomena of language, the mediation of visual experience, and the oscillation between language's material and symbolic components.
My work in sound, performance, and visual art investigates the transmission of visual experience through spoken and written visual tableaux framed within aural and visual forms. These tableaux are described through meandering anti-narratives, sedimentary layers of detail, branching subtexts, and multiple perspectives. These audio works are then augmented by parallel examinations and explorations of the same material in alternate disciplines, such as painting and installation.
My most recent projects explore various elements from the branches of a lengthy experimental text entitled Spanish Still Life that I wrote over a six year period as a creative response to the work of Seventeenth Century Spanish artist Juan Sanchez Cotán. Spanish Still Life responds to and utilizes the objects in Cotán's systematic series of still life paintings, and in particular the image Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, Cucumber (1602), as an initiating structural device.
The objects in Cotan's work, a suspended quince, a hanging cabbage, a sliced melon, and a jutting cucumber in the frame of an open window, are augmented by lists of text-based images and musical composition based on samples appropriated from obscure, peculiar, and unusual recorded vinyl sources, in conjunction with live instrumental improvisation.
Cotán re-examined the same objects and compositions from still life painting to still life painting, slightly changing each successive composition with additive accumulations of objects from work to work. My audio work Spanish Still Life in turn responds to Cotán's penchant for reinvention and takes his simple structure of additive accumulation to absurd ends. My current work in performance art, sound, visual art, and other media explore differing aspects of this overarching project.
365 Days Renamed is the fourth installment of this project.
