UW-Stout Department of Art and Design

“Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, (p. 78)

The classroom and studio milieu I try to cultivate balances structure and freedom, experimentation and refinement. I try to create a stable, yet flexible system that allows students to imagine and develop their vast potential to communicate visually. I see it as my responsibility to provide, or facilitate access to information that will influence the students in the acquisition of ideas and skills, and ability to pursue goals. Activities to that end may include lectures, demonstrations, field trips, book reviews and oral presentations. I view the classroom as a laboratory for exploration and discovery, providing a safe and honest atmosphere that cultivates compelling and provocative work, with a structure that welcomes new possibilities for students to find their individual voices and realize more fully their first amendment rights through visual language.

“How often is he tormented on the way by the desolate feeling that he is attempting the impossible! And yet this impossible will one day have become possible and even self-evident.”
Eugen Herrigel,Zen in the Art of Archery, (p. 9)

Excerpt from Philosophy of Education:

“At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical de-centering. Beauty according to [Simone] Weil, requires us ‘to give up our imaginary position as the center.... A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.’”  — Elaine Scarry, On Beauty, (p. 111)

My installations engage viewers in a phenomenological experience, that is to say, it creates an environment for the viewer in which an aesthetic experience can occur. It seeks to re-engage the senses as well as the sense of the unreal. To achieve this, the objects selected render unexpected shadows which become an essential part of a piece. Here, the material world gives way to a dematerialized, experiential reality. “It’s as if substance itself --transitory, evanescent, even at the very limit hallucinatory-- depended upon that substantiating agent, image for the sake of determining its own identity” (Gustaf Sobin). My art strives to reconnect the viewer to a space in which the sensual and the immaterial world resonate again, suggesting a context where the self is not the unbalanced center of existence.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Education:

M.F.A. and M.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998 and 1997
B.A., Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, 1990
LaCoste School of the Arts, LaCosteE, France, 1990