BIOGRAPHY is over on this page.
PERSONAL STATEMENT as of 16 March 2023
With the motive to add to the beauty I see in the world, I followed an intrinsic pull into art from a young age. I pursued several disciplines including dance, voice, piano, and eventually writing, painting, sculpture, photography. I dabbled with flute, clarinet, and collage, but found synesthesia was easiest to relate through media and performance. Often joking I was raised by wolves in the forest (since my father’s last name is Wolfe and our home was/is surrounded by nature), my imagination and senses were trained to the rhythms and perceptions from terrestrial life and an ancestral desire to live amidst mountains and sea. The ways art and science became bifurcated confounded me, as I found science easier to pass in school than art, but I found the demand of focus in art more engaging with the scientific methods to establish (epistemologies) around perceptual senses of space and time (proprioception and chronoception).
I understand art as a soulful pursuit: a means of emancipation and transcendence. The art I make is less about personal expressions of emotions, persona and soul, and more about the poetic understandings I found working through an anthropological frame of focus: the ways places make people. Artistic research in conjunction with art making allows me to ensure viewers gain the remembrance of their souls’ sovereignty by engaging with artwork. Beauty and the sublime concurrent with sensations of stillness and movement, I work to inspire reverence in relationships with places, sensations, notions, and people. When I say my art is not self-expression, I mean that it is not defined by the privileging of identity present in the post-modern discourse today. The notions I am most occupied by are ways to illuminate myths and find ways to rid the mind of stories keeping people from remembering their agency.
On my father’s Nordic/Germanic side: my great great grandmother, Ellen Amman and her sister Harriet Sündstrom, and my mother’s Italian/English go back to the Bavarian and Venetian conflicts. While I continually find myself creating at an intersection of Eurasian culture, my hope is that piecing together research in earnest through art inspires a memory that blossoms as beauty in the viewer.
In the understanding of psyche meaning spirit, I noticed the deployment of social policies through systems of thought exposed a covert spiritual war tactic. My personal perspective aligns with organising around enduring virtues and principles of personal sovereignty, emancipation and transcendence of spirit. Therefore, I do refrain from advocating for substance intake in favour of learning how to use the systems of the body and nature to touch the beauty and love transcending through the forces of nature.
While bettering material conditions improves the appearance of life, the qualities of life that illuminate the mind from the beauty in the heart arise from within. The fissures between the virtual and real have ripened our times for conflation, bloviation and dissolution. Therefore the nearly-universal experiences of the sublime in awe and reverie are what I seek to imbue in my evolving work as a poetic artist.
The way I make artwork is very much an erotic engagement. The difference is in the subtlety of which I relate to what and how I am seeing. I am loving what I see, and whatever feeling what I am seeing makes inside my being I alchemise into love. Even if I am seeing pain, weeping through joy or grief, feeling the twist of anguish, there is a desire to show this process of life as unrelenting beauty. The results are often confronting, sorrowful, or in some eyes, seem as nothings. That sense of apathy or nothingness is why what I choose to frame, put down, move through, and the edits made are made to be as meditative and sensual as possible. While I can, and often do paint and dance, or sing, any work I am making is to engage deeply in feeling. There was always a time I look forward to the future, and never a time I could imagine people could become bifurcated and witness people reaching to the past. I feel there is a deep need to recollect our sense of soul. I believe that is why people perceive me as soulful, weird, or strange. Why should we take time for these things people associate with religions is not because religiosity castrates or placates hedonistic behaviours, but it is that we need the nourishment in some form. That is the erotic of the space and time for communing. There is no coincidence in churches becoming galleries. The signs as to what is occurring, what we are searching for, what our choices are created, draws out our forms in reality from the background of reality. Therefore, in the images I choose, or any artwork I make-I am careful to choose every aspect of the work possible, so I can be closer to sure the consequence of engaging with the art can bear a useful fruit for the viewer. To me, it is a considerable responsibility to have that kind of intimacy with those who engage with my artwork.
We become what we practice and develop where we focus. Therefore the Vision-Body relationship brought my work with cameras and poetry into the realm of the senses, the tactile and performed. The research of Robert Sapowlsky, Elaine Scarry and Richard Grossinger give words to what I believe people have awareness of deep within their bones. My influences are many and varied; a harshly concise edit would be Kimsooja, Edward Burtynsky, Sally Mann, Olivier Debré, Michael Snow, Twyla Tharp, among plethora of rabbit hole studies that wove physics and meditation into geology, biology, and phenomenology.
Seeing the body as the generative force in cognition takes up a biological locus of reasoning. Biology already being physical, informs materials and perception. This bottom-up perspective allows for self-awareness and seeks to emancipate viewers from top-down (ideology) politics. The bottom-up understanding affords greater agency in creating beauty and harmony as mother nature ultimately runs this show regardless of ideological understandings or misunderstandings. An ideologically driven or bottom-down motive has merit as well, though as defined clearly in Hito Stereyl’s work, is a favoured mode of psychological warfare.
In a world mitigated by telematic interfaces, I persist through art because of its unique ability to work on subtle layers of culture. While culturally antagonistic trends in art continue, to work in service of beauty, vitality, healing, harmony, and truth seeking may realize art as the partner to science it always was and is for nurturing healthier knowledge that water the heart with beauty.
After years of wrestling with images and questions with free-will, determinism, subjectivity, and agency, I saw a way to reorient my visual work materially and performatively in joining science, technology, images, performance, textiles, and magnetic resonances (or the ways the interior of material phenomena is depicted using the quantum mechanic effect of oscillating dipole frequencies). The project has a working title of æsthetic resonances and serves to weave a visual, common ground for unique subjective perspectives to relate with each other through the tactile qualities of the invisible, radiant energies vibrating between terrestrial and celestial elements.