Visual artists do something that cannot happen in other artistic media. They present powerful images that share music’s transcendence of rationality, but also can envelope themselves in total communication with the viewer. Visual art, conceptually based or not, does not need a manual for it to be understood. To involve an audience an artist must touch them, move them, make them think or feel. My work uses several different techniques to achieve that goal, but all of them can be called a form of personal contact with the viewer. I do not seek to force feed those looking at my work. It is a conversation, and one that I do not consider successful if it has not touched, in some way, even the most unsophisticated child.

Visual artists create in ways that are impossible through other artistic media. They present powerful images that share music’s transcendence of rationality, but also can envelope themselves in total communication with the viewer. Visual art, conceptually based or not, does not need a manual for it to be understood. Even if volumes can be written about the work, it all comes down to the thirty seconds an artist has to speak to his or her audience. If the volumes cannot be condensed into that thirty seconds, and if those thirty seconds don’t touch someone, the piece has usually failed.

To involve an audience an artist must touch them, move them, make them think or feel. My work uses several different techniques to achieve that goal, but all of them can be called a form of personal contact with the viewer. In “alone,” by putting his or her name into a bottle, the viewer is confronted not only with one’s isolation among a huge mass of others, but that the isolation itself, common humanity, is the thread that binds us all together. In “blades of grass,” walking through a literal and metaphoric graveyard, in which each blade of grass represents a child’s death from AIDS in a single year, confronts the viewer with the immensity of reality and the tragedy of its specificity. In “GDP/Population Statistics,” s/he is absorbed in a virtual map of the world in which socio-economic inequality (and military intervention) is painfully correlated to geographic location.

I do not seek to force feed those looking at my work. It is a conversation, and one that I do not consider successful if it has not touched, in some way, even the most unsophisticated child. What makes us human is that effort towards communication, towards understanding, and without it art, and perhaps life itself, pales into nothing more than an imitation of a memory.

~2007