Coming of age in the late 70’s in a post Vietnam world I began my art career truly believing that we would never fight a war again thanks to the activism of the 60’s. I was one of the men, born between, March 29, 1957 to December 31, 1959, who was completely exempt from Selective Service registration. The aerial bombardment of Iraq in 1991 took me by surprise and began, for me, a gradual realization that I was a pivotal player in the cultural/political shift from a draft military to our current all volunteer military and that there would be an unending need for vigilance, against larger economic strategies that perpetrate the many varieties of global militarism, from the perspective of one who experienced a moment free from state mandate. Thus began a desire to evolve my aesthetic to change and take on more relevant content. Much of my work has since gained an activist perspective in order to begin identifying and defining emerging moral calculi and has lead me to explore more specifically; language, graphic or cartoon-like imagery, a schematic color palette, interactive canvas structures, silk-screen printing and a sensitivity towards an historical engagement. My attraction to these forms and contexts lies in their ability to interpret, archive, and engage with, the psychological strain of our reliance on digital information systems, platforms and structures, all the while maintaining the resistance of a hand rendered traditional liquid medium base and physical object presentations. Some of my hand-painted text drawings are static manifestations, expanded into a physical space, of online communication, that become interrupted, segmented and thus redefined by the formal convention of the picture plane. My interactive painting structures create an important transition toward a physical engagement with art that activates the viewer, bringing the higher orders of the art experience into a strange yet familiar pedestrian plane, freeing the viewer from their role of passive observer and challenging the siren call of the virtual. Ultimately my work explores, the phenomenon of: "seduction" and "arrogance" in response to or in view of the benefits of new technologies and with regard to the development of technologies, in the context of social narratives, then chooses to activate and address the viewer within the confines and intimacy of physical art.
December 2024
