Artist's Biography

???? to 2010

SummaryI have been a lifelong artist whose work spans painting, photography, sculpture, technology, and unconventional media, I spent two decades exhibiting and curating in San Francisco and internationally before stepping away from active exhibition

For as long as I can remember, I have made art and music. When I was seven years old, the local newspaper interviewed me about wanting to become an artist. My mother saved the clipping. In retrospect, it feels less like an anecdote than an early piece of documentation: before I understood what being an artist meant, I had already decided that was what I wanted to be.

I left home for college in 1993 and earned a degree in Conceptual and Information Arts from San Francisco State University in 2000. I remained in San Francisco for two decades, exhibiting work throughout the city, most frequently at Live Worms Gallery in North Beach.

In 1997 and 1998, I co-owned and curated an exhibition space at 1700 Market Street. It went through several incarnations - atelier 1700, Nommesen, Soernsen, Steinbock Gallery, and finally Floorspace - until we lost the lease. Running the space gave me the opportunity not only to make work, but to build exhibitions, work with other artists, and participate directly in the strange ecosystem of San Francisco's art scene.

I later spent several years in China, including two years in Beijing, where I curated exhibitions and showed my own work. I continued exhibiting in San Francisco and Beijing, and also showed work in Sweden, where the Swedish National Art Council still holds one of my pieces. One of the highlights of my career was selling a work to Jack Hirschman, San Francisco's Poet Laureate.

My most successful and longest-running body of work is the Wallpaper Series: oversized photocopies of my own photographs, glued directly onto canvas and then painted into. The process exists somewhere between reproduction and mark-making, wallpaper and artifact. Images associated with the domestic scale are enlarged until they become almost architectural.

My materials have always been whatever I could find—or whatever interested me. I have a particular affection for outdated technology, obsolete systems, and materials that carry their own history. My work has addressed the body, commentary on art itself, and the experience of observing life from the outside. I have worked in painting, murals, sculpture, photography, websites, and interactive installations, as well as less conventional materials and technologies including balloons, LEGO bricks, photocopies, and code.

I made The Eye Mac, placing my own eye inside an Apple Macintosh and programming the work in HyperCard—a language that was already effectively dead by the time I used it. I framed my own psychological breakdown and hospital journal as a gallery exhibition. I constructed mosaics from LEGO bricks. When an ex-lover destroyed one of those pieces during an argument, I exhibited the broken work as an installation. The destruction became part of the piece.

These works share an interest in transformation: personal experience becoming artifact, obsolete technology becoming material, destruction becoming composition, and ordinary images becoming something physically and psychologically larger than themselves.

I stopped being an active exhibiting artist in the late 2010s. But I have never stopped creating.