My work is a negotiation transpiring between analog media, sentimental comfort, and our shift from ten digits to two thumbs, mobile, abbreviated language, and digital lives. It is also a comment about cyber life and needing the key words on the backside of websites for spiders to have content to feed the almighty new machine, the internet.
Words and poetry are central to my contemporary, photography-based artwork. Extracted from an original photograph of one of my vintage typewriters, “The Art of Letters,” Keywords are structured statements that are integral to escaping confines—sort of like the internet! Sort of like religion.Haiku is composed of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables and evokes images of the natural world. Key words from LA in 2017… It’s the new light verse: 4 lines of 3 letters that inspire one singular thought. Sort of a word game with simple, greater meaning. Keywords are visual art, which is an original blend of typewriter poetry and concrete poetry.
Being a turn-of-the-century artist who has worked in publishing, from hot waxed galleys at the daily newspaper to the tweeting President and random video stars, the trajectory of my artwork is a constant negotiation of our analog and digital lives. The tension between the historic value of the past and the present is evident, while this work represents the present. This series is full of universal truths that challenge and withstand the tests of time.
While attending group mediations and lectures at the Self-Realization Temple Lake Shrine, I grasped my key words that minimized a thought or feeling into a simple phrase and noted them in this style. Obsessively, I started to think visually this way about other conversations.
I recognize the similarities between the elevated spirit, that esoteric part of us, and our digital lives—that non-physical, omniscient communication going on.Combining our abstract sides of life with the accelerating drive toward brevity, I created each kernel of universal truth in the fewest strokes.
