Date of Award

6-2015

Document Type

Project

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art

Department

Art

First Reader/Committee Chair

Thomas McGovern

Abstract

I am an excremental artist. I do not mean an artist who works with feces or is interested in manure but one whose artwork is expelled through the results of process. As a photographer, I am not as interested in indexing a location, a person or a moment as I am dissolving the structure of photography through the manipulation of photographic materials. I typically photograph landscapes that catch my attention for a myriad of reasons. The commonality between these images is anonymity of place. Hints of location are always present but never accentuated, instead their purpose is akin to a forging slug: raw blank material from which my artwork will be created. My photographic slugs are then entered into various processing systems that I have devised over the years. Common processing techniques that I incorporate include hand and machine stitching, chemically altering photographic paper and the integration of open-source electronics. These and other processes are mixed, matched and blended to form the corpus of my work.

The body of my work is not complete without my head, heart and hands. My intellectual interests are constantly feeding the physical processes described above. I have an extended engagement with photography’s rich history along with a critical commitment to philosophy. My intuition is permitted to work in concert with my intellect despite stark contrasts between the two. My intellect looks for structures and speaks in logical thought while my intuition arrives in waves of unarticulated emotions and ‘gut feelings’. The heart’s language is often more difficult to translate than intellectual headband but both are equally valuable in my process. Finally, my hands play a vital role in creating my art. They transcribe the conversation between the head and the heart and physically complete the processes defined prior.

My artwork is not conceived and the built into a structure, instead it is a result of the passing through a system. I consume copious amounts of stimuli (intellectually, visually, emotionally) and digest it through my creative process and the result is my artwork.

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