When trying to understand the recent growth of my art practice, it reflects my thoughts back to my most recent place of departure. I return back to questions of representation, especially in relationship to my origins as a painter. In the sense that in the paintings were the seeds for themes that I continue to explore: Technological and intellectual drives and the limits of their representational matrixes. Notions of presence, loss and absence construed within the encounter. Engaging with texts, being inspired by and challenging their limits.

The only addition to these preoccupations has been coupling them to larger social processes. Guiding me in this is the notion of dialogical encounter. This is a kind of "pedagogy of love" described by Paulo Friere, a dialectical movement where both parties are reciprocally transformed. My first project in this direction was blind leading the blind (2001), where I blindfolded myself for three days while visiting Washington D.C., a city I had never been to before or since, during President Bush’s inauguration.

Yet I am haunted by a desire to find ways by which I can return these ephemeral moments back to into the realm of representation. In this I feel like I share affinities with many contemporary 2-D artists and painters, who have expanded their art practice to embrace performance and conceptual practice while always returning back to the object or the flat plane. Artists such as Komar and Melamid, Byron Kim or Mathew Ritchie have extended their painting practice into social realms. Some have used technology to extend their narratives while others have engaged in performances and processes by which they’ve sampled and collected information from a public sphere and from which they’ve derived rich bodies of work.

My most successful attempt so far to achieve this was in the project: Thinking Failure (2002). The VCU map was an art object, (The text could not be divorced from its materiality.) that performed as an autobiographical text and essay ruminating on the project itself. I engaged in a one-week performance at the invitation of the school of art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Several weeks before my residency, I isolated myself in a room and tried to imagine the kinds of dialogues that I would have. I then created a "phrase map" to which I limited all of my speech in conversations for that week. Now I’m in the process of processing the recordings of the conversations from which I plan to create a distinct product, most likely in the form of an interactive sound installation.

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