Bloggin...

I’ve come to the conclusion that either I’m looking in the wrong places for inspiration or just over thinking it. So with that, I’ve decided to just keep working with what I’ve been doing and hoping that something will evolve from that.

Artist Statement

Since the invention of the automobile the desire to travel by car has become part of the American Dream. Although technology has enabled multiple ways of travel, the car is the icon that allows you to take full control of where you’re going as well as making for an enjoyable pastime.

Thanks to my parents and grandparents I’ve done quite a bit of traveling on the road as a child and I believe through those travels I have a great appreciation and awareness of the environment with an even greater inspiration to travel. Since those days my travels and discovering of the United States has diminished. Becoming more burdened with everyday worries, I’ve come to realize not only how much I desire to travel, but how deeply I miss my childhood adventures on the road.

Call it my peter pan complex if you will or some kind of mid life crisis in my twenties, but somewhere inside of me I would like to feel like a kid again. Having no responsibilities and able to drop whatever I’m doing to travel. In reality that isn’t the case and one must go on with life sometimes compromising or pushing aside a few of your dreams. Yet, through the art of photography I’m able to bring about my dreams in a beautiful and sophisticated way creating a series that is a reflection of my childhood as well as a projection of future travels in and out of the studio.

This is the artist statement that I presented with my series last semester and I feel that it does better explain the meaning as to why I found the inspiration to create what I did with my work. Although, I also feel that if my work were to be presented without the artist statement it wouldn’t get the same reaction or reading from the audience as if it were to be shown with a statement. Something that crossed my mind while I was attending Ann Kroeber’s lecture was the statement that sound effects are really what puts the viewer in the place of the movie, more than what’s actually on screen. If you have no sound in a movie or even a picture, one must rely on the subject and details of the work or to their imagination. In my case, as a photographer, many people rely on the artist statement to really understand the meaning and/ or concept to the work. That’s something that I’ve found that I love and hate about the artist statement because I like the idea of leaving the meaning open to the audience or individual looking at the photograph, allowing them to decide and relate to it for themselves, rather than depending on what the artist wants you to get from it. Although; at the same time I do enjoy and want for my audience to know what inspired me to create that particular work or series.

Ever since I’ve started working with miniature scaled things I haven’t exactly been able to verbalize or articulate the root to why it is that I find them interesting. I mean as children we all play with small tiny objects and toys, but there is that idea of distorting reality with miniature inanimate objects to make the viewer believe that it is something that it’s not that I find fascinating. However, with my work I try not to go to the extreme, giving hints to revealing its true reality, especially since I go to such lengths to making these small scaled sets. This also brings about the opportunity to apply my desires to create with and use several media and materials. Perhaps this comes from my background with the formal arts, because I’ve been taking art classes since I was in elementary school and have always known that I have great passion for the arts. From drawing, to sculpture, to painting, and of course to photography, I have always admired and enjoyed them all. Although with photography there is more versatility as well as stability in relation to how much and how widely it can be used. Also with photography, I am able to produce images of painterly quality with which I have printed onto stretched canvases; therefore turning a photograph into a painting, which in the end I guess someone could just paint a realistic oil painting without going through all the work and various steps that I go through, but where’s the fun in that? Plus, to get the quality and small hints of hand made imitated objects one would have to exactly copy or replicate my work first.

p.s. I hate crickets