With a proven track record of creating first class conceptual designs and managing diverse groups of people on projects ranging from interactive websites and iPhone apps to museum and municipal installations, I get the job done in award-winning ways.
With over 20 years of experience in traditional and digital media with a complementary background in science and fine art, the focus of my current work centers on visual, interactive and narrative design. In the creation of work and in collaboration with others the medium appropriate to the idea takes precedence: from welding, painting and woodcarving to websites, flash animation, augmented reality and 3D modeling – nothing is out of the question until the questions have been asked.
One of the things I enjoy most about what I do is working with others to create something fantastic with our talents; choosing the right people and challenging our creativity in a collaborative environment. To be the creative and organizing principle that brings people with unique skills together to work towards the completion of amazing design projects is a goal as a consultant, producer and project manager.
And the research! I love to organize and research! I have found that’s pretty unique for a creative. I’m just one of those lucky cats that has a brain working just as well on the left as it does on the right.
• creative direction
• visual and graphic design
• interaction design
• narrative design
• project management
• forensic and fine art
Artist Statment
I am a collector. I collect everything from toys, comics and coins to minerals, manga and movies. Mostly I collect images, text, textures, and stories. These collections surface all over my work. Much like writers gather and combine words to render a world—and in doing so, make sense of it—I layer and combine visual elements. In the arrangement of these elements, a story is created and shared. Collage, in materials and in skills, is a beautiful tool for arranging the best of these fragmented collections, these visual compendiums of life; to recognize, represent and share the connections I see.
Life is a body of connections. I picture these connections as an endless sequence of translucent layers, thin tissues of experience, each constantly shifting through the other, one always visible behind or in front of the other, depending on where you focus your attention. Stories exist in the interstices of these layers and are constantly examined, compared and compiled with the next layer, the next story. My work reflects this vision. I create in layers, constantly building upon what comes before, what lies beneath, pulling in what’s scattered off to the sides, always with an eye toward that great ordering force of experience: the narrative.
Layered visual narratives appeal to the human desire to organize the world and decipher the codes. In forensic facial reconstruction—just one of many techniques—the tangibility of layering is real and immediate. The field of forensic art itself layers my love of history, science, anatomy and fine art. The actual physical act of facial reconstruction also requires the detailed study of the underlying structure, the skull, in order to build up the layers that will produce the final likeness. For example, when reconstructing the angle of the eye there are tiny markers on the bone that indicate where the muscles of the eyelids connected to the orbit. Although in most humans, with rare exception, the eyeball sits centered in the orbit, by knowing the structure of those muscles and connecting those dots, you can determine a lot about how the eye looked in life.
My personal work asks us to examine narratives in a way that goes beyond “just the facts”, beyond the science. It challenges the assumptions that govern how we perceive and make sense of evidence within systems of authority. And it presumes to challenge the stories associated with those assumptions. I examine the stories that we create with the filters of religion, politics, culture, history, science and art. How do these stories – their facts, tone and intention – change when we consider them through these different lenses? I do not presume to answer these question, only to add to this conversation and enlighten the dialogue.
An installation I created for the Mutter Museum called The Hyrtl Simulacra, calls into question the biases of those lenses clearly and repeatedly. For example, one of the artifacts in the museums collection is known as a “child murder”. What do you picture when you hear that phrase? Do you apply a gender, a race, a social class? I first pictured a sinister white man, not wealthy but not poor either, crouched in a darkened corner waiting for his prey. As it turns out, the child murder was actually a young girl, eighteen years young, named Veronica Huber. She was executed in Salzburg for the murder of her own child during the late 1800’s. Knowing this little bit of the narrative changes the picture. I want to constantly be changing, challenging and expanding the picture.