USA Projects

My work combines ideas from Art and Science as well as touching on environmental and anthropological themes. I hope that I might inspire people to care about the world we live in by showing them an aspect they hadn’t seen before. 

I’m really excited to create a new body of work that builds on my recent work in (what I’m calling) photo/sculptures. I create a 3D image by drilling millions of tiny holes with a computer controlled drilling machine in acrylic, then filling them with color.

Here’s how it works: the image is separated into its component colors (CMYK, as in commercial litho printing), and each color is drilled and filled into one layer of acrylic. Stacked together, all these layers form a 3-D image that changes as the viewer moves past it. Each individual work can be several inches thick and they glow from the inside with the inclusion of back-lit LED panels.

Until now, I have largely procured R&D services from outside firms for the process of drilling the holes. With this project, I hope to purchase equipment that will allow me to bring the process in house. By doing so, I will have much greater control over the artistic process. Since many of my novel ideas spring from the direct examination and manipulation of process, having the process closer at hand should allow for less development time and more control over the final product as well as discovering the unintended jewels that I can’t even imagine at this point. It always works this way for me.

My work has always utilized technology.  This new work draw on my experience in commercial printing, color separation and slitscan photography. Exciting developments in manufacturing are now putting sophisticated 3-D tools, like computerized milling machines, within the reach of artists. Bet they are still expensive, so that's why I need your help.

The subject of my recent work has been free-flowing water as taken with my self-made digital slitscan camera. The results of this process is an image that borders on color-field abstraction, while retaining all the detail and tonality of a realistic looking photograph. Using the hole-drilling technique as described above will present considerable challenges in balancing the relatively low detail of the process with photographic readability as an image. Special image processing algorithms help turn dots into images in a very sophisticated way.

I shoot with a digital camera of my own invention. It records tiny slivers of a scene over an extended period of time to build up the image plane. In effect, I set up the “rules” and let the camera record what happens. My art, then, is as much about how I manipulate the machine as what the final image looks like. The content of the images is the passage of time itself, with the objects photographed being the carriers of that idea. My camera is kin to a telescope or a microscope--it allows one to see into a world not normally accessible to our human senses.

I would like to break completely away from the 2D world and show these pieces in the round. Because movement and change are required to create the images, there is a certain poetic symmetry that the viewing environment for the pieces also be dynamic. They could be shown anywhere there are people in motion--airports, sidewalks, museums.

For the most part, photographers have applied their craft to the imitation of the real world. The camera has been used to capture a frozen slice of time, arresting a single instant from its place along the flow of the time line. 

My photography examines the passage of time. With the aid of a digital slitscan camera of my own invention, the horizontal axis of the image is rendered as a time exposure. A single sliver of space is imaged over an extended period of time, with moving objects inserting themselves into the data stream at different speeds and directions. The result is a mind-bending swap of the dimensions of X and Time. Counter to classic photography, still objects are blurred and moving bodies are rendered clearly.

Instead of mirroring the world as we know it, this camera records a hidden reality. The apparent “distortions” in the images all happen in-camera as the image is being recorded. There is no Photoshop manipulation. These “distortions” could really be described as a more accurate way of seeing the passage of time, although unfamiliar to our traditional concept of the depiction of time and space in art. In other words, this camera is recording a reality that exists, but one we cannot see without it.