Contact

Telephone: (541) 857-6741

Studios in Medford, Oregon

Not open to the public

Installations

My installations are formed to allow the audience to celebrate and probe our experience of the world, in this case the sea, a part of the world from which we evolved but by our very biology we are doomed never to re-enter without air tanks or some sort of air support.

My aim is to give a fresh dimension to visual experience. My kinetic art is not just about literal movement. There is the science of e=mc² to back it up. But in testing the boundaries of personal experience I want to entertain a thread of cosmic speculation, to give a mystical dimension which is common to a dive into the sea. Divers refer to it as a Zen experience, of becoming unaware of the passage of time, of becoming completely involved in the present moment. But a moment that could hold dire consequences. At the same time of the Zen experience, there is both the thrill and the anxiety that at any moment life could be endangered to the extreme.

In the 1920s, Marcel Duchamp was the first artist in modern times to use actual movement to explore the mechanics of seeing. In the 1930s, Alexander Calder intrigued and entertained with constructions that invaded the space of the viewer and became alive at the movement of air generated by the audience. In the 1960s, Venezuelan Jesus Rafael Soto, through knowledge of physics, explored the notion of energy as a life force and speculated about the nature of the universe. In the process he discovered the moiré phenomenon but only as a physical action. Also in South America, Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticicia ventured into the personal with works that were a metaphor of the body’s own immersion in the atmosphere which surrounds and supports it.

I have known about the moiré phenomenon since I can remember because of the double layers of curtains that I had hung in my outdoor playhouse as a child. Later, in designing for the theatre, I used scrims and curtains both to separate and integrate space and time. Furthermore, I used the moiré phenomenon to present the absolute basis of reality, that everything is changing micro-secondly. However, it was my introduction to SCUBA diving that gave me the subject matter to leave the "audience as viewer" theatre behind.

Now I create my own theatre of artist and viewer-experiencer as partners in our joint simulation of a dive into the sea. But I say to my partners, I have created the setting. You are now free to create the play.