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Years of training in realistic oil painting has made me hypersensitive to the differences between how the eyes see and how the brain sees. I currently have two projects on optical illusions: an inverse U.S. flag and resulting photo series where photos containing the flag are inverted, and a series of participatory linocuts of lit candles where the viewer must use an after-image to complete the picture.
Through my collection of simple consumer novelty and industrial cameras–thermal/infrared, underwater, micro, motion sensing–I explore places that are invisible or easy to overlook without the camera.
Geodes are round rocks that are hollow inside and full of crystals. They are usually displayed carefully cut in half. I explore geodes slowly by hand-sanding through them so that the crystal interior is slowly revealed and creating time lapse photographs. This takes a long time, but it’s quick in geologic time.
My bae is red/green colorblind, and through our numerous neighborhood walks we spend a lot of time discussing our color perception. I created a series of realistic oil paintings showing the difference between the way he sees and the way I see.
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Both art and science involve exploration of the unknown. Though I focus on topics traditionally explored scientifically: e.g., geodes, optical illusions, color blindness, how cameras see light, my approach to the subjects is that of an artist: discovering and offering a new way to mentally picture the world, and uncovering values in things that most people do not notice or appreciate.