Both words and images can construct or limit worlds; writing for world building, curiosity, and perception-checking is a delicate blend of opaqueness and transparency. I enjoy capturing memories and reflections through poetry (open form), vignettes, and exploratory essays. I find great joy in individualistic moments that carry a sort of universality to them, where I can delight, teach, gently point to hard truths, and provide a steady line on the page. 

Words, music, movement, and images all come together to provide a unique blend of reflective experience for both the artist and the viewer. What’s your blend?

Mirrors are potent tools for assessing inner and outer landscapes. They serve to reflect, distort, and orient, and disorient and can be utilized and manipulated in both sobering and delightful ways. Projection is an act of mirroring, where we find conscious and unconscious elements of ourselves in people, experiences, and environments around us. 

The world around us reflects pieces of us back to ourselves. What do you see? And with this vision, where can you act from a place of meaning and authenticity?

Lingering and exploring often illuminate what would otherwise go unnoticed. It is in the act of wandering, in taking the 2 legs over the hypotenuse, that we encounter opportunities for meaning making. Instead of scrolling, an act we engage in to mindlessly “wander” and “discover,” if we practice the art of strolling, with distractions down and eyes engaged, you’ll find that there’s more than meets the eye. Set backs, spilled coffee, detours, and wrong turns can lead to moments of discovery and delight. 

What is at the center of a labyrinth? A self fulfilling prophecy. 

How do you greet moments that provide you with the space to change perspective and generate meaning and authenticity?

Growing up, I loved Magic Eyes books. They were all the rage in the early/mid 1990s and I remember my grandfather teaching me how to see the images on the page. This became a wonderful metaphor for a valuable life lesson. As we navigate our everyday, there are images, emotions, memories to discover underneath the hurry, stress, confusion, and fear. 

The beauty behind a Magic Eye work is that the image remains the same, unaltered, yet what you come to see seems to bloom right in front of you. The extraordinary is often hidden in the mundane and we come to discover it through the direction of our attention. 

In a fast paced world, attention becomes an act of devotion, what are you honoring?

Meaning, a byproduct of seeing, is a construct that relies on relationship, memories, experiences, and symbols. To establish and navigate meaning is to construct an authentic life; what elements we choose to include in our lives and the lens we elect to look through tints and tones the concept of “meaning” in our lives. 

Collage is an exercise in creative arrangement and experiential building based on the invisible language of meaning.

Illusions often reveal truth via an Imagination that is exploratory, not escapist in practice. Illustrations can be realistic, abstract, or somewhere in-between. To draw and manipulate lines, shading, and perspective means to become a sort of cartographer of the inner life.

As viewers, when we trace the lines and movement with our eyes, the images we take in gift us the understanding that there is a vast interior world waiting to be engaged with, waiting to be a co-creator in the meaning of our lives.

Truth is often embedded in illusions, what are you consciously and subconsciously taking in? How will you navigate your inner terrain as you seek to create a life of meaning and purpose?

Born in 1984 (the irony is not lost on me) I am a member of the last generation that remembers analog life. Not a luddite, not a tech nerd, I fall somewhere between and am often delighted by the tension that exists between analog and digital experiences and mediums and how they infirm one another. 

I find delight in taking photographs and using Procreate to transform the photograph into a dreamscape through brushstrokes, blurred edges, and soft corners. By making such subtle changes, the image looks like a photo but behaves as a painting. I feel this process mimics the act of perception, to experience an image, translate it internally as a form, and file it away as a memory. 

What happens when memory isn’t attached to an intellectual meaning but, instead, recalls physical sensations? How do you recognize and honor these moments in your life?

Photography is a unique artistic portal for both the artists and the viewer. In taking a photograph, there is a sense of capturing the “real” whether it is a moment, a landscape, or person, photography as a medium seeks to document. In this way, photos are meditative and inspire the desire to conjure up a moment in memory, to immerse oneself in a timespace. The curious gift photography can give us is the ability to revisit memories of our own by encountering images we have never seen. 

A photo of a woman lying in wait by the telephone is understood intellectually, but if the viewer spends time with the image, it will inspire the need to understand. In this pursuit, we begin finding ways of relating to the image and we immerse ourselves in an inner labyrinth of meaning, images, and emotions.

With a photo, you have been given the ability to time travel, to enter into a space of inner dialogue, and to interact with and manipulate memories. What will you reconstruct? What will you keep the same? How do these moments of recollection influence your present?

Item descThere are times where creating with physical mediums allows me to engage in a transformative experience and to capture this energy in raw materials. I have sketchbooks and notebooks filled with musings, scribblings, and works as I seek to actively engage with my emotions and environment. 

When you encounter moments of beauty and meaning, what about these moments is sensual? How do the senses light up your inner world?ription