Albert Einstein wrote: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” It concerns me that an unfortunate byproduct of our culture’s emphasis on expediency is the development of bad visual habits: I fear our eyes are closed. Surrounded by a barrage of visual information, we switch our gaze hastily from one bright light to another, scan these flashes quickly for value, and discard liberally. We often assume that we’ve seen everything when, in reality, we may have become a culture of trained glancers who fail to notice much. My work aspires to return a sense of wonder to people and to renew their practice of actively looking at the world they live in: to pay attention.
My body of work represents a study of perception and attention divided into three areas of investigation — Context, Orientation, and Scale — in order to provoke the experience of either visual or intellectual wonder. The resulting studies present my viewer with a serial exploration of a singular question as presented through different sets of signs as dictated by the language of media found within the graphic design toolkit: hand crafted artist books, analog printmaking techniques, large scale photography, site-specific installations, and video studies. Each of my projects stems from my desire to present the known in a manner that reveals characteristics of the unknown and to reveal the potential for discovery within the habitual and the depth of experience found within the slow gaze.
