black and white archival prints, 200 total
28cm x 76cm each

see biblio: Carr-Harris, Lao, Balzer, Deseriis, Godard, Anderson, Turner

The project remakes 200 stills from Stanely Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, 1963. These compositions are created primarily of mundane items that are repositioned, framed, and lit to imitate the original film still. The original still (left) and the mundane composition (right) are brought together and printed as a single image. I position mundane objects in the camera’s field of view until a relative match is achieved for Kubrick’s composition. This process is repeated until the entire composition is matched. A digital photograph is taken and named dr0001-s01-02. This naming system decodes roughly as cutshot-scene-frame. The installation of these works in total would run 500 linear feet. They require spacing so we might even double this to 1000 linear feet. Of course, this is madness. What is more likely is a way for each exhibition to determine which of the 200 are desired. The book published by AGYU in April of 2007 will be the entire archive (200). This becomes a rather convenient object to facilitate such a determination. There were opportunities for visual and linguistic punning, uncanny juxtaposition, and commitments to fidelity. Creating this many images meant I had a chance to explore these opportunities thoroughly. There is a video of the project underway that incorporates the time element of the film.

archival prints, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like” and “The work should speak for itself”, edition of 10
48.26cm x 33.02cm

The text for “I Don’t Know Much About Art” was extracted from sources based on a Google search result. The extracted texts make up the body of the print. Having developed an ambivalence to these recurring phrases I sought a way to reanimate them; perhaps in the same way jumper cables help cars by transfering energy from one place to another.

gold foil (chocolate bar wrapper
22.5cm x 17.1cm

Titles to date include: The China Syndrome, Scarface, The Godfather, The Magnificent Seven, The Invisible Man, and Dr Zhivago

Gold foil chocolate bar wrappers are hand-embossed with the title credits from DVD film cases. The work traces what this authoritative text and reveals both a copy (the tracing), and another authoritative original (the artist’s hand). The elements are complimentary as gold and credit. The works embody a conflation of experience and material, such as the movie and the snack food. It’s tricky to describe what I was initially after but it was wanting two things at once, perhaps an intersection, and you realize that what you actually want is a sign.

Three sculptural works

Bebida, foam core, modeling clay, 38cm x 23cm x 23cm

Copo, Polystyrene, laser prints, 15.2cm x 67.3cm x 58.4cm

Rolo, extruded polystyrene, laser prints, 73.6cm x 447cm x 63.5cm

see biblio: David Balzer, Rosemary Heather

For me the work is primarily about a selection process. I was looking for places in time that would begin to speak about something. Rolo’s figures for example are chosen for where the genitals meet, or the genitals and face, or face and ass. In Bebida, a seated figure leans forward to drink coffee. Here I saw in time that it resembled Geiger’s creature from the film Alien. At this moment everything is selected to facilitate this likeness. Copo in a sense was at first a failure I thought because it did not yield this kind of grotesque. But I came to see that it was different but not unsuccessful. The particular effect of Copo creates a kind of hypnotic surface. Unlike it’s grotesque counterparts, Copo’s successive states create a geometric harmony. In a sense it is the difference between organic beings in time and inorganic things in time (particularly man-made symmetrical things). Ultimately both expressed an aspect of what I was after - the potential for one thing or action to communicate another or to be embedded in another or to find in a thing another thing.

6 minute stop-motion animation, DVD projection, stop-motion frame, DVD is an edition of 3

see biblio: Yam Lau, Gregory Elgstrand, Kevin Temple

Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk features five commercially branded product packages that are transformed into each other in a six minute stop-motion animation. The transformations are manual. Horton bends, cuts, and folds the objects by hand. Each slight alteration is equal to one frame of video. The narrative is not linear as the title suggests. It uses certain moments as nodal points for departures that have different outcomes. The mimicry moves forward with Coke-go-to-tin, then back, and forward again with Coke-go-to-coffee. Horton employs various strategies for his reproductions: A perspective trick is employed when the material of one object is not enough to recreate the next one. The foil from cigarettes reproduce the features of a Coke can so accurately that we realize that he must be rubbing the foil on an actual Coke can off-camera. One segment of footage is reused yet reversed. Another sequence appears to be reused/reversed footage but is in fact two similar, yet distinct, acts of animation.

Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk regards a kind of mechanical advance on identity at the same time that it exhibits a mechanical loss of identity. In other words, things are becoming other things at exactly the same rate that they lose themselves. The transitional double that crowns any Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk sequence is an interesting object. It carries the sign of its former self (ie., DuMaurier cigarette pack), but it also carries the form of its intended self (Coke can shape). It is a very conflicted stage and makes for a giddy object. On the one hand it is the giddiness of a clever object. On the other hand it is the giddiness of losing recognition. But this is not precise. It is more like having too much recognition (the previous package plus the next package). I agree with Yam Lau when he says that my constructions/images have a surplus of desire. I think that’s true. They are themselves plus.

31 storyboards: comic art board with non-repro blue, ultra chrome ink, archival matte paper, rubber and cast stamping
48.26cm x 33.02cm (each panel)

The story is essentially a documentary of the artist Kristan Horton who builds a nuclear power plant beneath his studio by tunneling through the floor and opening up an underground space.

This fiction is represented in the form of a comic book mini-series. The 10 issues are comprised of 30 pages per issue plus a coverpage detailing approximately 3 panels per page. In total there are 10 covers, 300 pages, and approximately 900 panels. The mini-series walks us through key stages of development such as breaking ground, tunneling, excavating, constructing, precision technical work, et al. to the completion of an operational nuclear power plant.

Images culled from various sources such as magazines, internet, and books are modified and combined with my own digital photography and filtered to appear like illustration. To create continuity throughout the vast numbers and disassociate nature of these images, I make consistent use of a few actors to assume certain positions and expressions. They are people I know who come to the studio to be photographed separately.

The images are printed onto comic art board. Which is simply a paper inked with a non-repro blue template. In keeping with the tradition of original comic storyboards, the boards are stamped with title, page number, and artist signature. The comic art is near twice the size of a printed final image.

In the first issue, we are dropped into the story after an establishing shot. Smoke detectors are scrapped for their radioactive materials. Loic the Bobcat driver shows up. He and Horton proceed to take it apart. They walk the parts through the small front door and reassemble it inside. Loic digs and Horton joins in with a shovel. This activity is interspersed with mundane tasks such as drinking coffee or having a shower and going to bed. A sizeable hole is made in the studio floor and the architectural plans for the plant are revealed.

At a moment when nuclear proliferation seems immanent for power, research and weapons, we witness a concomitant rise in groups with expertise and access to this technology which includes countries and institutions. The have and have-not relationship regarding nuclear use is changing. In my fiction Walnut Nuclear Power Station (WPS) I attempted an expansion of this relationship by taking it to the individual level. The project began rather humbly as an investigation into opening up space - digging holes. At the same time I was interested in people who live ‘off-grid’ in order to obtain independence or produce smaller ecological footprints. This idea of opening up space became compatible for me with independence and coincides with my thinking regarding the amateur - the one who spends hours building train sets in the basement. In a sense, WPS is the ultimate basement amateur activity. The status of the amateur is typically defined by what is outside (professionalism) and it entails non-competition with the amateur working in a kind of autonomous space. That autonomy became interesting for me in terms of making art and certainly in comparison to those relationships in Modernism. It’s an autonomy that isn’t so much about exclusion or competition or prescription, but rather about maintaining a space for desire - one’s hobby. By linking this autonomy with nuclear power, I saw a way for that activity to be more consequential and as a result empower the amateur in a figurative and literal way. In other words to give this condition a critical focus. The decision to manifest this as a comic I felt was aligned with the amateur as a nonthreatening mode of discourse - a sympathetic rhetoric.

WPS regard the efforts and contexts of an individual who is engaged in a kind of mimetic rivalry with events in the world. The description of this rivalry I understand as essentially Girardian implying triangular structures of desire. Therefore, WPS is essentially a story of human relations, albeit from a single point of view. You know you have this amateur, simultaneously an artist, who is involved in an ambitious project. The ambition implies hope for transformation. The thing chosen to build or imitate is a nuclear reactor. By making this choice it shifts the ambition into an international concern. The private activity is now in a broader communication. However we must acknowledge not just the internal ideas of this project, but the external ones as well. Comic panels present a prototype for a fiction. When I think of myself as the creator of these panels I try to recall the motivation for that endeavour and it is the same. It is being in a mimetic rivalry with events in the world - to bring desirable things closer or to imitate and become other things. It entails shifting status, expanding scope, breaking laws, and so forth, contained in a protoreality.