Artist statement created 1/9/09 for installation proposal

In my work, I am interested in creating a non-verbal (or verbal, if necessary) dialogue between the artwork and the audience.  I am interested in work that changes with its viewer and its environment. As each idea generally begins from a reaction to a personal experience, I am often present in my works to further explore ideas of personal versus collective experience.  Like Joseph Beuys' I am America and America is Me, I do not delineate between myself and the artwork.  I ask the audience to share a moment with me as I am experiencing it.  I am interested in creating work which is interactive, which by looking at or interacting with it it, creates a new active experience instead of a passive one.  By using non-artists' materials, I am able to convey these ideas in a way which is playful and has a context outside of the art world.

 

In my recent work, I am interested in creating symbol-like objects exploring the duplicity of feeling both extended and held back.  I have been making simple single images intended to hold and communicate complex and emotional ideas about the limitations of freedom.  Once again, I find these works to be similar to Beuys' fat sculptures which are both minimal in form and highly conceptual and emotive.  I also draw from the video work of Kate Gilmore, who creates straightforward and dangerous, yet playful, scenarios to communicate her ideas. 

For my proposed backyart piece, Sometimes it's a day, sometime's a week, I am once again exploring ideas of freedom versus confinement using a playful material such as balloons.  By using a material which has lighthearted connotations, I am interested in drawing in the viewer into a whimsical atmosphere, one which may remind one of a party or of childhood memories.  yet, I am interested in the ephemeral nature of this material, which lends itself to a bittersweet interpretation of the work: one which discusses loss, a lack of control over change, and once again plays with the idea of attaching one's self to so much that  one is then confined to a fate which he or she is not in control of.  The balloons' attachment to the surface in a large multitude represents one's many desires and therefore attachment to them.  The balloons' deflation relates to the idea of life moving along without you and of change that one is not in control of.