My work explores the relationship between humans and technology. I’m interested in how the proliferation of technological convenience influences perception, as well as the implicit commentary technologies reflect of their human creators. I work with sculpture and screen-based media to investigate how this relationship unfolds across both physical and digital realms.
Though they are not completely disparate, my use of these two mediums reflects two different approaches to making. The sculptures are created to perform symbolic actions. This intended purpose directs the forms they take. They enact gestures, often to the point of hyperbole, that are inspired by my interests in communication, utility, and machine aesthetic. I draw inspiration from both my own interactions with technology and the ways in which I see it used in the world around me. By creating kinetic or interactive mechanisms, I hope to speak to the existential worth and the putative utility of automated processes, while also assuming the role of inventor.
Conversely, I typically construct my screen-based works through a process driven by aesthetic and collection. Like sculpture, video relies on a temporal trajectory of discovery. Just as a physical object requires time to navigate the space that it occupies, video reveals itself over the course of a linear timeline. My work with video is fueled by an interest in the visual forms that digital media takes. The visual language of digital media is full of contexts, cultural assumptions, and implications, all of which contribute to making it a fertile area for artistic research. The infinite malleability of digital media allows me to iterate quickly and intuitively. Rather than attempt to empirically catalogue this digital vernacular, my work strives to epitomize instances of its existence.
Regardless of medium, my work tends to exude both a wry humor and a technological loneliness. Whether it be a physical mechanism that performs a repeated gesture, or an animation comprised of internet-sourced assets, I attempt to represent human actions and appeal through objects or experiences that inherently lack social capacity. This sentiment is indicative of the relationship that we often have with technology. We give a lot of ourselves to our various devices, and this soul-spilling gesture is an action that cannot be reciprocated.