assistant professor digital arts ucci@uoregon.edu office 104 Millrace 1 (541)346-1448

As an artist, I am committed to working with relationships of theory, material and concept within an expanded field of visual exploration in contemporary art. My own work is premised by the expansion of all these fields and is informed, first and foremost, by working with material from an idea-based perspective. I locate my practice as an installation artist at the intersection of material and its integration with concept. My work is produced with the medium that best conveys its conceptual content to my audience. This exploration of the idea is further contextualized through combining visual elements in each body of work. I conceptualize my ideas with light, sound, video, performance, photography and text.

A central metaphor in my work is the ‘location of desire’ and the ‘pursuit of happiness’. Language theory and philosophy inform my creative approach and my subject matter is often determined by my emotional response to my physical surroundings. In describing my work, I would say that I have an unabashed interest in the romantic and that I prefer, though not exclusively, to work with the merging of two conceptual strategies. These are the application of a system of rules to the process of creation and the appropriation of borrowed elements for its execution. An example of this preference and strategy can be found in my production of the vinyl record, titled, 368 songs with the word sad in the title mixed into one song. In this work I addressed notions of happiness, or rather, its lack, through applying conceptual strategies and using appropriated material as the content for the execution of the work.

In working with contemporary notions of appropriation, I re-author and recode existing texts, musical pieces and films. In addition to the use of an imposed algorithm, another common element in the work is the recursive relationship between the original and its recoded meaning. Specifically, I am engaging with the materiality of my choices that are driven by an expanded field of meaning that incorporate the phenomenal world. This includes relevant texts, ideological statements and specific substrates or visual representations, imagined or real, which expand the context and content of my subject matter, either physically or philosophically. Form over function has been upended by the interrelation between the two as perceived through recycling visual culture as my material source.

Since my move to Eugene, Oregon in 2004, from Toronto, Ontario my work has been exhibited in Breman (Germany), Limossal (Cyprus), Jinan (China), Barcelona (Spain), Porto (Portugal), Toronto (Canada), Newark (Delaware, USA) and screened in Bangkok (Thailand), Basel (Switzerland) and San Francisco (USA) with a public project in Seoul (Korea). A parallel trajectory is professional work in independent film production, I will be the editor for the independent feature film, Kent State, written and directed by Karen Slade. I previously edited Karen Slade’s short film D.U.M.B.O.