About My Fine Art
I think of myself as an Observationist. Not in any formal sense, but as a description of how I move through the world — slowly, attentively, and with a certain interior quiet that has always been the engine of my practice. I watch things. I notice things. I hold onto them. My work begins in that act of close attention, long before it finds its form.
For thirty years I have been accumulating an interior archive — images, objects, encounters, and moments gathered across more than twenty-five countries. This is not nostalgia. It is evidence. A factory outside Moscow photographed a decade before it became a piece. Oxygen tubes that looked like tree roots. The rings of a tree cut from a sidewalk where someone planted it without considering what they were setting in motion. The incubation period between an experience and its expression can span years. What I have learned to trust is that the delay is not inertia — it is the work doing what it needs to do.
My fine art practice lives at the intersection of the tactile and the electronic — between the physical world of found objects, organic materials, and natural processes and the mediated world of video, light, and screen. The organic and the man-made do not resolve in my work. They confront each other, and in that confrontation something is revealed about our entanglement with the environment we both inhabit and alter.
My current body of work is a series I am calling Actualities — a term borrowed from early cinema, where the Lumière brothers used it to describe their short recordings of ordinary life. The word feels right: documenting actual things, actual moments, actual evidence of the world in a constant and often overlooked state of change.
SELECTED RECOGNITION
— National Endowment for the Arts / Culture Works Grant Recipient (2024)
— Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Grant Recipient (2020)
— Theresa Pollak Award for Excellence in the Arts — Filmmaking (2012)
— Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship — Filmmaking (2007)
— BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University — Filmmaking & Cinematography (1993)
— Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Undergraduate Fellowship — Filmmaking (1992)
COMMERCIAL & DOCUMENTARY WORK
For information about documentary films, live event production, and cinematography work, visit the Flexible Cinema section of this site.
Tree Cut (a documentation), 2025
Natural wood, 2 channel video
This is the first showing in a series I have been calling “Actualities”
When considering a piece such as “Tree Cut (a documentation)” as “complete”, I must also consider the incompleteness of nature itself and how it is in a constant evolving state of change. I am also reminded that we are not apart from nature but a part of nature and the environment. We have an impact on the things we choose to do, such as planting a tree that was improperly placed in a particular spot. Thus, in this case, needs to eventually be removed due to the health of the tree and its encroachment on “our” environment, being a sidewalk or proximity to a house. The tree itself has become a risk, however we are not immune to being a risk to it as well…
These “citizens of our environment”, albeit a tree, has a life if its own. It does serve a purpose and has seen many things in its lifetime, just as I and my fellow humans have. It does what a tree does and we do what humans do. However, nature takes its own path. Lightening strikes and wind blows, branches fall and hit cars, which can cause damage and “inconveniences,” even threaten our safety. Naturally, as humans, we want to fix it. We take away the problem that someone long ago most likely didn’t even consider when making the decision to plant this tree. This circumstance causes me to consider the impact on the choices I make today and how that can affect other’s down the road, even if I am no longer around 100+ years from now.
the air we breathe 2023
Like many people, the environment is near and dear to me. It’s the water we drink, the earth we cultivate, and the air we breathe. When exploring ideas about how to best express my “concerns” with this place we all inhabit for just a short time, I recall this past summer when I underwent a medical procedure that required sedation, and subsequently oxygen assistance.
This past summer I was installing a walkway and had to remove some roots. I was reminded of the oxygen assistance and specifically, the tubes and how they resembled roots of a tree. Both give…aid…and assist…in life…
Over a decade ago, I stumbled across this factory outside of Moscow, Russia and was struck by the smoke and smog spewing from the stacks. This image stuck with me and was the final inspiration for “The Air We Breathe.”
I still ponder the interplay of these three elements… what do they mean, how do they resemble and contrast each other, and what is the interplay between them as we look through an old dirty window?
Past to presence 2023
exhibition
multiple pieces, all single channel video
When exploring ideas about “Past and Presence,” I reflected on many past pieces that had been conceived that were never realized. One common thread I discovered was a consistency in my aesthetic and worldview that really hasn’t changed. Nature and one’s environment, and my desire for absolute attention in those settings, are two of those common threads. It is often an outlook that shows itself in a meditative way. I recall those moments of its original experience and that need for me to be absolutely present. With the incubation of the concept over many years (or decades), I recall that no matter when a particular piece becomes something more than an idea or a sketch, the need for my absolute attention returns, then and now. Surprisingly, I also find myself mentally and emotionally returning to that moment of its original inception.
downstream 2019
single channel video, founds objects, stream water
using material from a nearby stream, a tank of found objects from natural to pollutants from that very same stream, i explore how our impact on the environment has an effect “downstream” that often we cannot see. Juxtaposed within a polluted tank itself on a submersed monitor portrays images of natural beauty to, in contrast, further explore this notion.
Persons places and things 2017
multi-channel video, sound
“Persons places and things” explores the multifaceted nature of in-the-moment experience through documentation. through multiple screens, the random play of those moments and the interplay of sound with images creates a life upon its own and essentially a narrative that does not repeat itself.
Patterns Behind Creation 2015
single channel video
“Patterns Behind Creation” looks beyond the conventionalities of traditional film structure to creating a more visual experience involving rhythm of changing imagery that reflects a certain color and theme. Like a moving painting, the abstraction closely resembling Impressionism becomes part of my technique and the narrative itself.
