Current Comment
My work delves into natural history, museums and collections, cultural, social and individual interpretations, evolution, including the devastating impact of the amphibian extinction event now effecting our environment. The currently ongoing Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship work looks at conceptual correlations between amphibian and human skin. You will find that the hundreds of animated video studies on my website subtly at times, blatantly at other times, will ask the public to look deeply into their personal interpretations of these issues.
An abstract in a scientific paper concerning this work would reference an *accepted obsession* with collecting and interpreting.
This website is a maze of collections of animations and images dating back 20 plus years. It has been built to get lost in. But there is also a method to this maze madness. The online studies are built to inform installation projects as they become tangible assemblages of artifacts that move people to reinterpret their personal relationships to the environment and concurrently to frogs and evolution as they correlate to the paternal intimacy of our skin.
* I accept this personal obsession with collecting and interpreting. The basic premise of my work explores an obsessive human instinct to collect. While the instinct to collect in other animals seems an unusual anomaly to me. Pack rats, ravens, foxes, hermit crabs and various other animals instinctually collect but humans collect on the scale of the Smithsonian. Museum collections, natural history collections in particular, preserve some of our most highly valued artifacts. These historical collections of specimens as artifacts signify and are continually utilized to explore the boundaries of our physical scientific knowledge. Art collections on the other hand explore our correlated overlapping intellectual, conceptual and visceral interpretations. Over the past few centuries we have also collected and consumed much of our natural environment, potentially to our own detriment. Now is a significant time to merge the sciences and arts to reinterpret our collections along with our instinct to collect.