+ Recent Work    

Massive Freight   Single channel, split screen video  5.28 min.   2015                                      Giles Gallery       Eastern Kentucky University    

There are many events where one could choose to mark the beginning of contemporary consumer culture, but for me none is so prescient as Jan 4, 1903 when for the first time industrial technology, big media,  and the entrepreneurial spirit all converged on Luna Park, NY for the filmed execution of Topsy the elephant...more

Sirens' Song Four-channel video installation (one channel mirrored)                   2014-15     At the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art

Sirens' Song reimagined for the UICA as one of the featured video installations for the event Bring Your Own Beamer with the addition of another video channel and a two-way projection scrim... more  

Sirens' Song Three-channel video installation (one channel mirrored)                 2014-15         Installed at The Toledo Museum of Art 

Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight selected Sirens' Song to receive the Second Award as part of the 95th Toledo Area Artists exhibition... more

Blows Hot and Cold   appliances, single ch. video  132" X 110" X 70"                        30 min.  2014

"the artwork does not fulfill desire, it unfulfills it."

                                                            ... more      

A Short Song of the Shore to be Sung Daily Without Being Seen     Single channel video    3.00 min.    2014  

Occasionally, in the course of going about our busy lives, we have brief, fleeting moments when we bump up against the shore of ourselves- passing thoughts or private reveries when we imagine our own death, contemplate the enormity of time, empathically experience the world through another's eyes, or marvel at the strangeness of the world around us... more  

 Slap and Tickle  Single channel video installation  17.17 min. 2014 

A structuralist video about mutability and change. In close faming, mouths come in and out of focus either biting or kissing the screen. The sequence of bites and kisses is established by translating a Heraclitus quote into its ASCII eight bit binary equivalent... more 

Quotidian (Redux Wolfe) 230 QR code hang tags that link to images from the year-long social media project, Evidently    108" X 108"     2014

Quotidian reinstalled, part of  the Double Exposure exhibition at Wolfe Gallery.  The text is the first  part of a quote from my sketchbooks: "All we have are secrets or stories. Art is simply the transformation of one into the other."... more 

Quotidian  653 QR code hang tags that link to images from the year-long social media project, Evidently.         119" X 216"     2013

What we are experiencing is the ascendancy of the quotidian and the encroachment of Pan-Vegas sprawl.  This is the birth of the para-extraordinary, and for visual art, it is democracy in the worst sense of the word... more

Sirens' Song        Two-channel video installation           2013                           Installed at Malone Gallery, Troy AL

Sirens’ song is about seduction. It is a piece about the struggle to remain intellectually, and existentially curious and engaged with the world, resisting the concurrent totalizing pulls, the sirens’ songs, towards the very edges of the phenomenological.  The human tendency is to turn away from engaging with the world toward the Punctum (a small point, a blind spot, the self) and the Grid (totalizing systems, science, religion), the terminal points that bracket lived experience.  These two extremes, Punctum and Grid are the points at which the world disappears, transformed alternately into Image of the System (Grid) or the Image of the Self (Punctum)... more

Evidently  Social media photo project   format & dimensions var.                  2012-2013

Evidently began as a challenge to create one artwork a day for a year using an all-mobile workflow. This was my first attempt at being fully post-studio and anti-object, moving the whole art making process out of the studio and into the world.  Hosted on Instagram, the project also fed to Facebook, Pinterest, Flickr, Twitter, and Google+.  more...

Vigil (Analog Pixelation)     digital imaging, wood           46" X 45"

One major feature of all analog systems is random unwanted variation- noise. Given enough time and distance, noise eventually swamps the signal. Random variations slowly accumulate, subvert the system and become dominant. Digital  channels of surveillance used by institutional power to spy, coerce and control by eroding privacy and detecting deviance can also be co-opted by the surveilled to broadcast deviance,imperfection, individuality and self-indulgence to social body,  re-inscribing the marginal (analog) at the heart of mainstream (digital) culture... more

Itsa Stretch  Electronic Billboard Project     Toledo, OH.   October,  2012.

Itsa Stretch is the simplest and most graphic of my proposals.  Not coincidentally it is also the most superficially affirming and positive. However in addition to  appearing carefree, the spread toes could indicate pain or tension.  It could just as easily depict a lynching as it could a child on a swing. I was also directly referencing the pre renaissance images of the hand of God descending from the clouds. Quite a difference if God offers not a hand, but instead, a full-impact, toe-splayed stomp... more

Elephant Call video loop,monitor,wood,found objects 9.05 min. 2012 
36”X64”X12” installed at Moreau Gallery

Elephant Call is a working through of many of the same themes of distance, world and spirit as AKA. I prefer the term logos to spirit, Logos perhaps is best translated as "the word remaining within". This unvocalized speech refers to consciousness but also extends to include the unspoken order, that which lies beyond the senses.  Owen Barfield coined the very pedestrian term "the unrepresented" as a way of pointing to interaction of human consciousness and the physical properties of matter/energy that bring the the sensate world into existence... more

 Pineal Eye       video Installation, electronics       9.55 min.   v.2  2012

A recent incarnation of Pineal Eye that uses a larger 7" screen.   The effect is somewhat more aggressive, whereas the original eyeglass viewer (see below) feels more intimate. I built this in order to have a robust version that traveled well without me... more

 AKA        single channel video          4.05 min.             2012

"IF YOU LOOK CLOSELY YOU CAN SEE THE BALD EAGLE SIT ON THE PINE..."

AKA is based on a first-hand account of a fishing trip to Spirit Lake, Alaska, also known to the locals as Elephant Lake.  Spirit Lake is 3,980 miles from Toledo.  I have never been there.  The video was inspired by a very matter-of-fact account of a rather uneventful fishing trip on a mundane personal website. Distance is largely what this piece is about, distance from spirit and distance from elephant (for me a metaphor for the world)... more

Packing Up      two-channel video installation         7.35 min.           2012

Cancer is no joke.  Neither is confronting one’s own mortality.  The seriousness of these two frightening realities however, doesn’t prevent them from being ironic:  As we sicken and age we become increasingly preoccupied with health.  The closer we approach death the more reflective and conscious we become of life...  more  

Pineal Eye  Video Installation, cellphone,optics,electronics, 9.55min.  2011 

Pineal Eye tells the story of a boy’s visit to the optometrist.  The treatment for his “lazy eye” has unintended side effects and the boy loses his metaphysical and perceptual equilibrium, introducing him to a world haunted by absence... more

 Subimago  Video installation, 1.30 min. video loop, electronics, masks, wood

"Tallula made these masks for me... I don't think this is what she had in mind..."  The subimago is a unique morphological stage in the life of a mayfly.  No longer a nymph and as yet a functional adult, the subimago is particularly vulnerable...  more

The Boggle Project Ongoing series, digital imaging on canvas, 36x24", 2011 

The Boggle series is a series of simple experiments designed to test my skill at postnostication, the rather common but none-the-less uncanny ability to foretell the past...  more  

Hobson's Choice  Ongoing series digital imaging on canvas, 36x28", 2011 

Questions of identity and identification must always be answered in the plural, and choices, when we make them, are simply provisional, pragmatic and expedient. Can a multiple choice test function like poetry and point toward the richness and ambiguity of existence?..  more

Telemetry  Video installation,  63x36x92", 3.22min video loop, electronics

I documented a debate with my daughter: Is intelligence or God immanent in a croquet ball?  This exchange is played for a ball that has been wired with an embedded surveillance microphone.  The telemetry received from within the ball is amplified and translated into a LED array, a visual “ball language” display of what it is “sensing”...  more 

Second Coming   Audio installation, 7 min. audio loop, mixed media, 168x48x48”, 2009

The rumbling sound of a rolling ball emanates from the tube, seeming to repeatedly approach only to  recede down another conduit.  This piece explores inference and anticipation... more  

Point of Control audio installation, dimensions variable, stools, stilts, electronic duration 3.22

Point of Control is an interactive audio installation about choice.  The audio track describes a journey back into the swamps of the “alligator brain” to the “wisps of jelly” that make our decisions well before we have made a conscious choice...more 

Lay Bare video installation,  69x24x18"  27 min. loop  2009

...The sense of time reversal is difficult to maintain as one continues to watch.  The piece uses the scale dependence of time perception to explore epistemology and the culture of false disclosure in both science and entertainment... more  

 Monster Feet  video installation,  four 5" monitors, 66x84”  2009

What little things we do to make ourselves feel a little bigger...more

Pell Mell  Video installation, 3 min. video loop on 7” monitor, 2009

Pell Mell explores the effects of temporal compression and distention on memory, attention and perception under pressure of “small screen, low-fi" culture...  more 

Combover  Audio installation, 90x96x66”, oil on panel, wire recorder, a mile of stainless steel wire, electronics

Combover is named for a kind of practiced yet naive denial once commonly exhibited by the prematurely balding.  In this piece I use this as a metaphor for the ways in which the weight of memory distorts perception, which in turn biases and alters memory... more