Statement
I create situations that encourage people to enter states of art-like heightened awareness.
Using a variety of techniques, I quietly make alterations to everyday spaces such as hallways, bathrooms and elevators, playfully folding anomalies into the environment for viewers to discover. The physical pieces are not precious in themselves; instead I consider the experiences they engender the primary works of art. I expect viewers to overlook my interventions, discover them, second- guess them, wonder where they are or are not. In this way, my artworks are as much about what happens when someone looks away from them as when he or she looks directly at them. As the Buddhist proverb cautions: Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.
Most Western culture presents art by isolating it. Picture frames, pedestals, stage prosceniums, gallery enclosures—all of these conventions work by clearly separating what they contain from the mundane surroundings. These distinct boundaries are signals to switch on the attention and sensitivity required for viewing art, but are also cues to switch them off again when the viewing is finished. I prefer to make pieces that admit no clean division from their environments, so that a viewer’s attention may diffuse outward into the rest of the world.
I want to create an atmosphere in which elements of the environment hover in a quantum state between art and not-art. Blurring the incidental with the intentional allows me to raise questions about routines and habits of observation, about where our attention flows and which perceptions we endow with legitimacy, and about the nature of artistic perception.