disparate bio & statement bits...

academic Bio
Before returning to school as a mature adult and parent, I had over ten years of experience in business and both digital and physical design. Like many adult learners, my academic journey was atypical. I have just finished the terminal MFA degree in digital art and new media at the University of California. I am a conceptual artist whose fuses new media and traditional arts. The subject of my work borrows from my employment experiences, art practice, and preferred digital ethnographic research methods, which results in an anthropological study of technology in relation to design, professional practices, user interfaces, and user behavior. My art practice informs how I develop courses that are salient to today’s technological and collaborative culture. 

description of work: how a strange process leads to two unrelated but connected bodies of work
conceptually the body of my work is a reaction to living in the posthuman new world from the critical (and frustratingly vague) vantage point of being a post postmodernist. my work is bred from the juxtaposing of my own technological quandary. you see, the digital tools I use and need in my art praxis are also the tools that keep me uneasily aware that the realness of my humanity feels intrinsically and proportionately reduced in the never-ending race of "faster and more". i often develop the richest ideas for these conceptual projects while playing with the tangible material paint. Ironically the depth and quality of the concept and the painting are in sync.

influences
conceptually I am guided by Bertolt Brecht's connective relationship with the audience, Margaret Mead's ideals of personal and cultural responsibility, and contemporary art critic Nicolas Bourriaud's writings about the semionaut's role. visually and technically I am influenced by a seemingly disparate group of artists: barbara krugar, John Heartfield, Laurie Simmons, Cai Guo Qiang, george Rousse, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jeff Wall, Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, and clifford still.

style
My sense of humor noir is my stylistic signpost. The visual dialogue requires the viewer to possess a sleuth like eye, who is particularly attracted to a socially charged bumpy ride. I layer and veil visual double-entendres to expose the axis of several steps of meaning. Work is logically laid out, like a handle on a door, a door in a room, a room with a person, a person in a home, a house in a culture, a culture in a country, and a country in time. Each artwork is a riddled bread crumb on one of several trails in the broader scope of my work.

design bend
Even as a very young child, I sensed the unusualness of my obsession with creating the right environment and expression using texture, light, color, mood, and balance, but it was in my mind where I indulged my sense of conceptual space and abstract narratives. how humans interact with objects and the structure of space was my main interest in my starting career as an interior designer. Then as a print and web designer my focus was on the seamless integration of the illustrative obvious and the hidden messages.

scholarly interests
the emerging canon of digital art and new media comprised the research topic for my MFA thesis paper. A secondary body of research was generated about how major museums are shaping the curatorial, preservation, and documentation practices and new standards through the developmental stages and content within their web presence releases. Also of interest are the emerging economic realities affecting the artist, gallery, museum, and art academia in the digital age. My thesis installation the "blissomatic surreal" employed metadata imbued sculpture, video, and print in the strange relationship between two eras. The audience was guided to confront their own personal map of the breakdown between the two spaces.