basearts -portfolio

Teaching Philosophy:

Early on in my educational career I studied sociology. When I started art school, the predominance of French structuralist and linguistic theory was waning, while American post-structuralism and post-modernism was at its peak. Writers like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard informed my work where I was attempting to address the idea of overlapping systems of meaning within photography.

Still very relevant today, I regularly quote, assign or reference many semiotic and linguistic terms and theories in my work and in my teaching. In addition to the formal aspects of making photographs, it is clear that social and cultural issues are just as prescient, giving way to the newer focus on visual literacy and visual studies. Relatively new to the canon, visual studies is certainly a developing area that engages a range of theory, informing today’s artwork. With this is mind, I propose that ‘post-digital’, or ‘post-internet’ visual studies offer a fluid and serious methodology to understand contemporary image-making for photography as it integrates with electronic media.

The emergence of the internet and the electronic image has exposed the arts to a global audience and to global influence. The mix and the ‘mash-up’ of divergent cultural influences and conceptual interests, is dynamic and inclusive, opening a new dialog in which to teach, learn and create. It seems imperative at this point in time that artists and those mentoring artists engage with these emerging technologies and ideas, as well as create an informed teaching environment inclusive of cultural difference and the important influence of diversity.

My teaching method is about saturation. I present my students with the broadest historical and theoretical foundation of aesthetic and technological material as possible. From there, my expectations from the students are project-based. I place great value on making work, since there is no substitute or equivalent to process and production.

The most motivating factor in my teaching is the degree to which the students actively engage with the information and begin to test the aesthetic and conceptual choices of the work. I’m deeply gratified by the one on one relationship I develop with my students when there is contact made between what I’m teaching and their visceral response.

Finally, dialog and critique is an integral part of my teaching. It informs the process and provides an opportunity for perspective and reflection. Through the critique process, students learn to verbally articulate their intentions, ideas, choice-making and solutions – as well bring to the fore the underlying conceptual thinking in the work. Of course, the basic class structure and information is laid out in a syllabus, it is much less stressed than the expectation that students will learn to make use of the critique process as a foundation for editing their choices, developing a critical maturity, and ultimately become independent thinkers.

Artist Statement:

Play - Photographs, drawings and notations - references and thoughts, cast into a frame and forming relationships. Tools, apparatus and concepts constructed or arranged in a desire to encourage meaning.

I teach and create forms and the population or enrichment of those forms.

Technological developments in media must be accounted for and understood.

Historical and theoretical exposure is vital.

Sustained production contributes to maturation of the work and the artist.

Ideas exploit but also shape the forms of new media – all media.

“The specificity that photography elicits through time, place, point of view, can draw meaningful references into a work, and make for a rich and complex network of relationships. Conceptual and aesthetic meaning is built on this network of relationships.

I am not solely concerned with the photographic image but with combining art-making forms like drawing (illustration), language (performance), text (written word), moving image (video), or sound (audio). Working with these diverse media, I experience a sense of cohesion, as well as a freedom to experiment. I find a greater similarity between these diverse forms than difference, and in this consistency find a sense of freedom to experiment.”

-end-

Selected Works, 2006-Present:

LABOR_SF, 2005-06, 98X20, DIGITAL INK JET
LABOR_NY, 2005-06, 82X20, DIGITAL INK JET

on center, 2005-06, 24X78.5, DIGITAL INK JET
on angle, 20050-06, 72X24, DIGITAL INK JET
dandelion, 2006, 24X64, DIGITAL INK JET
holly, 2006, 24X50, DIGITAL INK JET

NIGHT_RAIN, 2007, 57X20, DIGITAL INK JET
NIGHT_COVER, 2007, 49.5X20, DIGITAL INK JET

Utensils, 2008, 13x19, Digital Ink Jet

---

“MEMO:” , 2004-7
- http://www.basearts.com/work/memo.html

Through these series, memo: and architectural elements I am interchanging the notion of a language of signs, symbolism in the arts and religion and the corporate memo – all of which presume an understanding within a closed system of meaning.
Symbols drawn in illustration of the impact of time, travel and diverse experiences on memory and my own sense of identity. There are implied references to place, art history, spirituality and culture. Making a poetic form of a memorandum - abbreviated and or understood within a shared context.

The meaning between image, drawing and text as elements of linguistic theory.
Language as a shared secret or an internal MEMO.
Reference to art making and the act of framing events and experiences.

Digital Inkjet
Proof Dimensions: 8.5x11
Final Print Dimensions: 24x56

“Architectural Elements”, 2004-6
- http://www.basearts.com/work/elements.html

Exposure to natural forces, primary forces. Making sense of making meaningful relationships of art making with natural forces at work and play in nature. Theoretically, there is an engagement with elemental principles of architecture and installation.

Digital Inkjet
Proof Dimensions: 8.5x11
Final Print Dimensions: 24x56

“Perceptual Apparatus” , 1992-96
- http://www.basearts.com/work/percept/index.htm

Altering physiologically processes toward the potential exchange of /or communication of an experience through vision versus the presentation of or representational image.

Relationship established between my own experience and the visual experience.

Encouraged viewer to actually see things differently.
Eyeglasses as metaphor for an altered or shared point of view.

Silver Prints/Sculptural Elements
Proof Dimensions: 8.5x11
Final Print Dimensions: 8.5x11 +installed elements

"Beach" , 1988 –
http://www.basearts.com/work/beachweb/index.htm

An image/text puzzle/poem made of cross references between my relationship at the time and our experience living and working on the beach, characters acting out a relationship and staged on the beach and the notion that there is a universal language of signs that could represent the experience of being a man and a woman in a relationship. The beach as a metaphor for life or a shared experience.

Relationships between images.
Relationships between methods of communication - image - text - diagrams.
Encouraged play by the participants or the viewers in the sand boxes or small beaches provided.