basearts -portfolio

In my classes, I vow to always teach from an actively anti-sexist, anti-elitest, anti-racist, anti-exclusionary perspective. My students will be exposed and indoctrinated to a globally multi-cultural, racially and fully gender inclusive perspective in all course work with particular emphasis upon an inclusive revision to history of the arts and photography. Inclusion will be the overarching theme within the development of each students Individual Artistic Discipline and Creative Practice. Art and Artists have always been political and activistic. We define/redefine the culture and the culture must be change(d).

I am a teacher of art and media. I am a teacher of technology. I am a firm believer in the transcendent nature of art and technology. I am a student devoted to the arts through technology. My primary objective is to overcome the inhumane nature of technology and to manipulate its service not toward its own progressive impetus but to the service of humanity as a means to extend human cognition. Art and technology have through time propelled and extended human cognition beyond individual consciousness. Art and technology have allowed us to improve and progress, to pass on meaning and means, emotion and understanding through written history and sensual exchange. I believe current technologies at the service of art will extend that cultural consciousness.

There is an oppositional nature to teaching art through technology. These fields occupy opposing realms of the human mind both physically and intellectually. It is therefore important to find a way to bridge our use and experience of them, bridging fields of study requires a flexibility of methodologies. I am a pragmatist with regard to the process of art making. I am an existentialist when investigating arts meaning. I am a postmodernist in framing an historical context. I am a technologist when articulating a makers methods and finally an opportunist when encouraging a new student to engage in the process. Ultimately, there is no alternative or equivalent to experience through process. Teaching Statement : The emergence of the internet and the electronic image has exposed the arts to a global audience and to global influence. The mix and the ‘mash-up’ of divergent cultural influences and conceptual interests, is dynamic and inclusive, opening a new dialog in which to teach, learn and create. It seems imperative at this point in time that artists and those mentoring artists engage with these emerging technologies and ideas, as well as create an informed teaching environment inclusive of cultural difference and the important influence of diversity. Within my fields of study, photography, visual arts, digital media, technology there is a broad range of both technical and aesthetic material. This being the case, I feel the challenge is to develop a cohesive approach that builds on the overlaps between these two primary fields of information; retrieval, exchange, production. My teaching method has been about saturation. I present my students with the broadest historical and theoretical foundation of aesthetic and technological information as possible. From there, my expectations for the students are project-based and grounded in personal experience. I place great value on historical awareness(locating the work) making the work(process), exchanging the work(product), since there is no substitute or equivalent to the research, process and production experience. My primary objective in teaching is to initiate a process whereby students begin to test the aesthetic and conceptual choices in their own work. This challenge to or formulation of - artistic practice, processes, and methods inspires reinvention and reassessment within my own teaching process. In successful instances there develops a self propelling loop - teacher to student, student to teacher. I’m deeply gratified by the one on one relationship I develop with my students, when there is contact made between what I’m teaching and their visceral response. Finally, dialog and critique is an integral part of my teaching. It informs the process and provides an opportunity for perspective, reflection, reinvention. Through the critique process, students learn to verbally articulate their intentions, ideas, choice-making and solutions – as well bring to the fore the underlying conceptual thinking operating within the work.

Artist Statement:
Play - Photographs, drawings and notations - references and thoughts, cast into a frame and forming relationships. Tools, apparatus and concepts constructed or arranged in a desire to encourage meaning. I teach and create forms and the population or enrichment of those forms.

• Technological developments in media must be accounted for and understood.
• Historical and theoretical interplay is vital.
• Sustained production contributes to maturation of the work and the artist.
• Ideas exploit but also shape the forms of media – all media.

The specificity that photography elicits through time, place, point of view, can draw meaningful references into a work, and make for a rich and complex network of relationships.

Conceptual and aesthetic meaning is built on this network of relationships. I am not solely concerned with the photographic image but with combining art-making forms such as drawing (illustration), language (performance), text (written word), moving image (video), or sound (audio).

Working with these diverse media, I experience a sense of cohesion, as well as a freedom to experiment. I find a greater similarity between these diverse forms than difference, and in this consistency find a sense of freedom to experiment.

Through these series, memo: and architectural elements I am interchanging the notion of a language of signs, symbolism in the arts and religion and the corporate memo – all of which presume an understanding within a closed system of meaning.
Symbols drawn in illustration of the impact of time, travel and diverse experiences on memory and my own sense of identity. There are implied references to place, art history, spirituality and culture. Making a poetic form of a memorandum - abbreviated and or understood within a shared context.

The meaning between image, drawing and text as elements of linguistic theory.
Language as a shared secret or an internal MEMO.
Reference to art making and the act of framing events and experiences.

Exposure to natural forces, primary forces. Making sense of making meaningful relationships of art making with natural forces at work and play in nature. Theoretically, there is an engagement with elemental principles of architecture and installation.

Altering physiologically processes toward the potential exchange of /or communication of an experience through vision versus the presentation of or representational image.

Encouraged viewer to actually see things differently.
Eyeglasses as metaphor for an altered or shared point of view.

Silver Prints/Sculptural Elements
Proof Dimensions: 8.5x11
Final Print Dimensions: 8.5x11 +installed elements

An image/text puzzle/poem made of cross references between my relationship at the time and our experience living and working on the beach, characters acting out a relationship and staged on the beach and the notion that there is a universal language of signs that could represent the experience of being a man and a woman in a relationship. The beach as a metaphor for life or a shared experience.

Relationships between images.
Relationships between methods of communication - image - text - diagrams.
Encouraged play by the participants or the viewers in the sand boxes or small beaches provided