Work from the RISD Graduate Thesis Show 2009

A big thank you to all my friends and family who supported me over the past two years (and before).

Here is my latest sculptural offering. I'm not quite sure what is going on, but I know I'm experimenting with surface and movement in a way I'm not used to. Right now its stuck somewhere in a [(Pollack/Reinhardt/Rauschenburg) + (something else)/ water droplets] place, which isn't all bad, but not really my intention. I am still dealing with ideas of nothingness, phenomenology, and physics though - presence/absence, light/dark, levitation, gravity, electrons and photons, etc. Definitely gonna need more investigation.

Long time, No update

Its been quite some time since my last update. Im going to be in a group show in a few weeks in Newark, NJ at Gallery Aferro called Tabula Rasa. It opens March 21.

I will also be in a group show in New Haven, CT at a place called Creative Arts Workshop, opening Apri 10th. It is called Sky's the Limit: Built, Unbuilt, or Just Imagined. It is their annual juried show, and was juried by Janet Echelman, an amazing artist who a Fellow at Harvard.

In other news, I have been nominated for an International Sculpture Center's (Sculpture magazine) 2009 Outstanding Student Acheivement In Contemporary Sculpture Award. I am still far from receiving the actual award, but the nomination by my school's faculty is quite nice. Let's Hope for the best.

More new work

Here is a piece I just completed. Its called Asymptote, in reference to a limiting line that is never reached, but is infinitely approached. I feel like it is a return to a mode of working I was heading towards, but kind of veered away from when I came to grad school and attempted to try new things.
Essentially it is two curved walls that recede back towards a column of extremely bright lights. The pic is low res and taken with my phone, but i really think its a cool pic none the less - although in real life, the light is difficult to look at, the pic exaggerates the brightness of it. Better documentation will be on my website soon.

Something i've been thinkning about

There is an inherent quality of digital media that lends itself to elaboration on the idea of abstraction, especially Minimalism, as a practice. It allows for an ability to further the dialogue about the reduction of form, action and idea to their most basic elements, pure information, which approaches the point most near non-existence; a space similar to that of traditional (written) language.
I am pondering the similarity to the storage of information in the brain, as well as the dissipation of information in the brain. On the same note, but on a macro scale, there seems to be a parallel to information sent as wave-from (radio, light, etc.) and its atrophy as it traverses space away from Earth (or any other source.)
What function do the rate of demise and the ability to decode/translate/recycle have on a work of art's (or anything's) value? Is the value of a vehicle for communication married to its ability to be translated?

Work in progress

Here is a work in progress that i am pretty excited about: I am videoing myself practicing (Zen)meditation for 30 minutes a day. The video (digital) is then transferred to an external harddrive for storage. The harddrive, with the video stored on it, is the final piece. I am using a Lacie brand designer (Niel Poulton) harddrive for its minimalist aesthetic. One of the things i am thinking about is the transformation of an action’s (or anything's) meaning when processed to a hyper-minimal state of existence. The use of Zen is interesting in that it is one of the major influences on minimalism to begin with, (i.e. John Cage), and still quoted persistently in minimalist design. To reduce a reductive process is to aim for a new nearness to Nothing. The image is of the harddrive (currently on a pedestal - this may be revised.) (As a sidenote, my benchmarks are measured in space (gigabytes), instead of time, and are 100GB, 250GB, and 500GB.)

Outliers in the Data

Here are images from a project I finished in the spring, where i painted different trees a solid color. I was thinking about creating kind of abnormalities in nature, exceptions to the rule. I was also trying to confuse the ideas of order and chaos, in that the trees, once ordered (by becoming a uniform color) would make apparent the previous order that was hidden in the uniform chaos of the forest. Although for me the "real art" is the actual painted tree in the woods, where one may only happen upon it by chance, I chose to document them in a fashion that is reminiscent of Bigfoot/Sasquatch photos, in that the subject is not always in focus, or is not the focal point of the photograph.