Behind Things
Between the years 2012 and 2013 A.D., I'd become immersed in work on a series of paintings that had occurred to me in a rapid period of what felt like excited revelation at the time. Through the process of their development I discovered that, though the nature of their content was distinctly painterly, formally it was the living process of painting's buildup, erasure and reformulation of surface and symbol, and the restless and indeterminate state of becoming, that was truer to its expression than the concretization of the art-object. I understood at that point that the ideas I'd come upon needed to be brought to life in another way.
This is what set me on the ongoing journey of assembling the resources and skills necessary to realize what I'd envisioned—what has proved to be a winding adventure leading down multifarious new (to me) avenues from sculpture + model making, to machining, cad/cam/cnc + 3d printing, molding + casting, mechanical design, pneumatics, electronics, computer programming, woodworking and others. Many of my tools and technologies have been developed and built from scratch.
I always find it interesting to see inside of another artist's working process. This exhibit is designed to give some context to my transition from painting to stop motion, cel animation, animatronics, and beyond, and to shed some light on a few of the homemade mechanisms and fabrication processes involved.