My work explores the poetics of narrative structures in visual art—the complicated ways meaning is constructed, interpreted, and disseminated in the image-saturated world around us. From early work with conceptual performance notation influenced by John Cage and Fluxus, in the 70s, through a profound awakening and awareness of the social and political systems that influence visual interpretation that began in the 80s and 90s, and currently to considerations of the virtual imagination, networked space and digital world building, I have followed a path that foregrounds the complexity of the experiential over formal aesthetic presentation but relies on a theoretical background practice of research and experimentation from which it is generated.

In recent work with the social media platform Instagram; non-fungible-tokens (NFTs); blockchain; and digital video game technologies; I have been exploring non-hierarchical networks where meaning and value emerge through use—through the process of exploring the very systems within which they are produced and distributed. This work can be directly linked to my early work in performance notation and Fluxus influenced life/art and its expansion with social and political networks over the years through my involvement in such projects as the San Francisco Queer Cultural Center, as founding member, and work as visual arts curator for the non-profit arts organization, Creative Labor (2016-2020).

My current research has evolved along side this work to an exploration of marginalized aspects of Modernism (esoteric, queer and feminist sensibilities), rethinking and adapting these ideas and practices in both analog and digital frameworks.

During an artist residency at the De Young museum I explored the idea of “the museum” by creating a video game, The New World (2017) within an installation that included 100 hand-sewn velvet pansies. The work playfully rethought the structure of institutional space with an interactive experience created by participatory, physical labor and virtual engagement. The Fairies of Weimar (2020-present) created as an homage to the 100 year anniversary of the Bauhaus, was based on research into the theosophical ideas that influenced Wassily Kandinsky; pedagogical practices of masdasnan employed by Johannes Itten; experimental craft techniques of women weavers Gunta Stölzl and Annie Albers; and formulations of abstract identities through costume and stage designs by Oskar Schlemmer.

Still exploring manifestations of marginalized, queer modernisms, I have become keenly interested in developing a more physical practice in my art making since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. My research of the Bauhaus weavers inspired me to begin a daily painting practice during the social “lock-down” that began in 2020. As I developed these paintings based on weavers techniques, I began to see similar patterns and systems that have emerged in certain graphical representations of generative code, game board patterns and user interface design that I have been exploring in my digital work. The tension between analog and digital; picture plain and screen; private expression and networked experience are the threads that weave through my current work.