oh yeah

This project is a series of painted portraits. The images for the paintings came from snapshots posted on the web and the paintings were made by workers in a studio in China.

oil on 4" x 4" panel with faux gold leaf frames, 2006

This was a project that took place on ebay. I selected images and text from former ebay auctions by other people and reposted them as my own auction items at the same starting bid price as the auction from which they originated. I added a line to the beginning of the auction text stating: "Thanks for stopping in at the auction. This auction is for a digital C-Print. It is not for the item represented in the image" The auctions were tagged as photographs of landscapes, portraits, still lifes etc., depending upon the genre that the picture resembled. I chose the ebay theme of "gold frame" for the auction pages.

At the close of the auctions I took a screen capture of the auction pages with the pictures, the text and the gold frames. I had these digital images printed as C-prints and shipped them to the winning bidders along with documentation of the original auction as well as my auction. Two of the twelve auctions did not have any bidders (the starting bids were pretty high) so the prints were never made.

When I was doing this project I thought maybe it was merely a clever way to make a picture and an interesting way to connect with "collectors" anonymously. However, once the auctions ended and I had the C-prints made, I was pleasantly surprised at how stunning they were as actual photographs. I only had them in my possession for a few hours though, between receiving the prints from the printer and shipping them to the winning bidders. Maybe someday I'll print the two that didn't sell so that I can have one of my own.

For this project, I loosely followed a business model from the world of fashion: that of making â??designer replicasâ?. I worked in a painting style that looked very similar to that of Cara Ober, another local Baltimore artist. I used economical materials (acrylic wash on paper rather than paint on canvas). I signed my name to the paintings and included it on all printed and electronic announcements; I was not making forgeries or counterfeits, I was making knock-offs.

Some of the images and text were appropriated from sources such as free online clip-art sites, the dictionary, gardening magazines and an antique book on phrenology. Others, I invented. The work was shown in the lobby of a corporate building, as I felt that it was a perfect context for this body of work. The artist statement that I included in the press release was a fairly neutral one describing the paintings in terms of personal narrative and alluding vaguely to other issues I was interested in.

I was mainly interested in issues related to art-making and market forces: problems of intellectual property and the cultural commons, of authorship, of novelty, of the ethics of oneâ??s studio practice, and of the ways in which a picture functions in a given context. Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, I was threatened with a lawsuit and in response, posted a new artistâ??s statement at the exhibition site discussing these issues directly.

While this project may have upset some people, ultimately I think it was a compelling investigation into the making of pictures and the making of the â??meaningâ? of pictures through various texts.

Continued. See previous project

This project was an exhibition I "curated" featuring work by three fictitious artists: Nadine Freund, a video artist and avatar in the virtual metaverse Second Life; Ariana Wol, an old-school performance artist and documentary photographer; and A.N.N.A, an "international digital collective" and online AI help desk persona on the Ikea website. The first few shots are of the exhibition installation and the others are the individual works by the the three invented artists. Images from this body of work continue in the next project.

Most of these images are from works in progress. They are either screen shots from virtual environments I have built or frames from videos made in those virtual worlds.

In recent years I have become increasingly interested in virtual landscapes: ones which are constantly in flux or interactive or somehow mutable by the inhabitants/players. Most recently, I have been creating 3D environments using OpenSimulator software. These landscapes can be viewed and navigated online by other users. Unlike the post-apocalyptic landscapes of many video games, the spaces I create might be described as post-post-apocalyptic, wherein crumbled parking lots are covered over by fields of grass, smoke filled skies are clearing, and one is distinctly aware of the absence of human inhabitants or â??playersâ? of any kind.

The drawings in this project are made with powdered photocopy toner on paper. I apply and manipulate the toner using paintbrushes and erasers, and set it using heat. The toner creates a grainy, soft-focus surface reminiscent of photographic enlargements.

The video is a portion of a longer series videos taken in realtime from a virtual simulation of the same location.

My desire to make this work began with a single photograph I took-- a rather mundane and off-balance picture of a river-- that, for whatever reason, captivated me. It also stemmed from my interest in Landscape and its possible functions in contemporary art.

All of the work is based on that single photograph and reproduced in multiple. Though identical in imagery, each piece has its own mood, visual properties and qualities of the hand. Individually, each one is a fairly innocuous copy of a banal photo. However, as a group they have an odd relationship; perhaps on some level they evoke a feeling of the Uncanny.