Biography
I think and create as a mode of scrutinizing my own existence and how I may or may not be a part of the world around me. Interested in relationships, from the microcosm to the macrocosm, my work is witness to the interconnectedness of personal and global perspectives.
One that reeks of string theory and butterfly effects. From the global war on “Terror”, Chinese Shark Fin soup, to the BP Gulf crisis, we miss the correlations of all species ecological and environmental interdependency.
The oceans are the last Earthly abyss where all of its creatures are demonized and viewed as expendable and profitable. For centuries our cultures have mistaken the ocean’s equilibriums for monsters that need to be destroyed or pillaged. What happened to the vast banks of cod? What created the Dead Zones in the Gulf of Mexico?
Sharks and squids have many different personas attached to them. As an environmentalist and surfer I wish to preserve and protect the oceans. As an artist and political satirist I can see the semantics in how different people personify animals and things. Correlations made between one’s wants and how they supplant value of one over another. Is it possible to suck a viewer in with morbid attractions, playing into possible ignorance to elicit an ethical synaptic epiphany?
These characters of sharks and squids easily shift from one value or persona to another. Sharks can be seen as reapers; “the men in the gray suits”, as surf culture has called them, or if shown in vast schools they are able to represent sexuality (sperm) or stand in for formations of war planes on a looming attack. Squids too symbolize a multiplicity of readings that are able to flip from feminine or masculine, cute and alluring, or harborers of death. As alien the idea of earthly destruction is, I wish to use characters that are alien and otherworldly to the human condition to state the obviousness of our own self made demise.
