Pre-pandemic, I was making physically triggered, augmented objects (sound emitting drawings). During the pandemic, I adapted my practice to develop the concept of site specific, interactive animation (basically online-animated-experiences thoughtfully embedded into the physical world). Between 2020 and early 2021, I exhibited three separate, massive projects of this kind.
This newest ongoing series combines my pre-pandemic and pandemic art mediums. The objects in this series (drawings framed with casts of my hands) are enhanced with online identities. Unlike my pre-pandemic work, these offline objects are not connected to the online world through audio clips, but through animation.
During the winter of 2020-2021, I cracked my head open on a rock while surfing. I found myself compelled to draw reef breaks, the desire to make portraits gone. So perhaps these are contemporary portraits of landscapes–in that they depict online and offline elements of each location’s identity.
I hiked to secret surf spots throughout a notoriously localized surfing community in LA, drew from life in ink, and then created animations in the studio. Indulging in this impulse to make a painting that “did,” I played with what it would be like if a painting could come alive–what could the few moments before and after that still image look like?
