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I prefer art primarily about the inventive nature of the mind and tend to champion work whose currency is human behavior. For me, critique has always felt constraining and reactive, allowing the ideas of others to set my agenda, thus denying too large a portion of what I as a unique individual have to offer to the dialogue of contemporary art. Though my creative instincts were developed primarily under the influence of entertainment and popular culture, my attraction to Fine Art has always been related to its ability to empower the individual. As it exists now, art is the only cultural exercise capable of constructing meaning without having to adhere to the properties of any specific medium. In fact, according to my definition, unlike the context of pop culture and entertainment, art has no exclusive contextual borders. Art as a context values gestures and objects that may not be popular or commercially viable but still play a vital role in expressing the human condition. Art is also uniquely empowering to the individual because of its ability to isolate ideas—slowing them down and allowing for perhaps the deepest level of contemplation cultural artifacts can have.

I feel constrained by the notion of compartmentalizing my artistic identity to a specific medium. I think it is fair to say that working in a variety of disciplines has become accepted practice in the contemporary art world. Though the majority of my mature work is object-oriented sculpture, I find this acceptance beneficial and liberating in that it allows me to focus more directly on the subject of a piece as opposed to adapting the subject to my particular medium. I make art from a variety of materials, using a variety of techniques, but it is important to me that my entire body of work remains at least somewhat cohesive and intelligible as a whole. It is my hope that odd consistencies emerge from works that, if individually viewed, might seem completely unrelated. I attribute this in part to my belief that an art object’s value and meaning come predominantly from its ability to point to the behavior and unique intellect that produced it.

All of the objects and gestures that I make are in a sense surrogate selves with a metaphorical nature. With the exception of a few anomalies, I generally fabricate everything in my own work. The physical constructions I make are often the products of ingenuity, will, and patience. Not knowing how to make something usually does not stop me from attempting it; in fact, the often maddening and tedious process of “figuring it out” is what gives my work the personal, quirky, homemade quality that I find essential to my successful pieces. I am comfortable letting individual formal decisions direct the construction of things I cannot yet clearly define. In fact I find that it is only after a solid period of mechanical process that I gain access to the part of my mind that generates good ideas and allows me to make the less obvious decisions that ultimately give my successful work its true power and novelty. I force my sense of order and aesthetic vision onto sources chosen with the intent of communicating what uniquely defines the way I think about the world around me to begin with. Each individual piece typically has a different impetus and therefore distinct meaning, but all my work represents me in a way that goes beyond merely explaining what I was thinking about the particular subject of the work at the time. It is in this way that I hope my work represents the psychology of contemporary mid-western American culture in general and the eccentricity of my mind as a delegate of this culture in particular.