Statement of Purpose: Art as a Research Discipline

I arrived at the concept of “art as a research discipline” in the course of my own writing, and the possibility of making a contribution to artistic progress inspired me to seek an MFA now, 6 years after finishing my BA in Visual Art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Looking at the history of art, “progress” does not move from good to bad or bad to good, but amounts to evolution of style, form, and purpose. Research in art tries to answer the questions “Where do we go from here?” and “What is the next step?”, or even “What is the next revolutionary jump?” Duchamp's Fountain, in the Salon des Refusés in 1917, constituted one such revolutionary jump; no one anticipated it, or could have predicted it. This is part of what makes research in the arts fulfilling, exciting, and something I'm going to pursue.

My artwork is informed by a stern, slick humor, where existential and spiritual concepts are illustrated in comic book lines and played as video games, steeped in a low-brow irreverence that hints at institutional critique.

Unification comes through the recurring theme of people and their experiences being shaped, or even warped, by technology: the human form is transformed into machine, and then into spirit – something completely transcendental, and no longer of this earth. Universal consciousness is approached, by abandoning the “self-other” dichotomy, and by considering whether the “Me” in “My Body” or “My Mind” can be drawn out, isolated, and then re-contextualized within a greater whole.

Pieces draw on mental illness, introspection, and sublime, Blakean fantasy, as well as the experience of my own traumatic brain injury 11 years ago and the ways I've learned to live in a fundamentally altered universe, to create forms and ideas that help me to understand who I am, and how “I” (as in “my conscious mind”) relate, structurally, to the other parts of reality. A study of consciousness is ultimately a study of cosmos, each giving rise to the other, and I explore that bridge between personal and ultimate reality by posing the deceptively simple research question: “What are we?”

In seeking an MFA I am beginning a life-long career at the university level. In addition to pursuing my research goals, I want to show developing artists that they needn't feel excluded by art and institutional culture, help them find their own expressive voices, and gently guide them in the execution of their craft.

In our contemporary society, I feel a university setting is the best place for a research-oriented art practice to develop and flourish, freely informed by other disciplines, and unconstrained by market or fashion. For the past 6 years I've worked in web design and development, taken courses, and refined my body of work with more mature hands and eyes. In Fall 2009 I'll resume my formal education, and begin a focused career in the fine arts.