Drawings and Projections, at the Tahoe Gallery, 2008.

The exhibition traced the contours of a mind that’s in the process of failing. There were multiple images of a frail old woman, sometimes surrounded by visions that don’t quite correspond to the reality around her. Two large-format drawings were “colored in” by digital projections, which included brief animations that provided missing elements of the drawings themselves. The old woman’s hallucinations of ghosts, and of improbable visitations by gatherings of birds, alternately seem to comfort her, and to provide her an index for her deterioration.

Links to:

The Exhibit Blog

Review in the Reno News & Review

Multimedia Dance Theater Performance and Art Installation, at CounterPULSE, 2008.

A performance created in collaboration with Navarrete x Kajiyama Dance Theater, Element Dance Theater, and artist Ilya Noe, staged as part of the San Francisco International Art Festival. "The Mapping Project" included video projection, animation, live music, and an exhibition of digital prints. The theme of the performance was the involuntary crossing of borders. Half of the dancers enacted images culled from stories from their grandparents, who suffered various displacements from the Second World War; the other half played out scenes of contemporary migration, making border crossings into shadow economies. The stage was dominated by a sculptural aluminum house, which was assembled, moved about, taken apart and reconfigured over the course of the performance.

Link to:

The Performance Blog

Aquatint Etchings, at the Fetterly Art Gallery, as part of the "Paper Cuts" exhibition, 2007.

A print sequence, “The Patron Saint of Discerption,” part of a series of works I am building around fictional “lives of the saints.” This sequence in particular was a response to images of martyred saints one can find in the old churches of Europe. There, the saints may offer to the viewer some example of their martyrdom – eyes that have been gouged out, a breast that has been cut off – displayed on a platter, as if serving a dinner of themselves. In this sequence, it is left to the viewer to imagine the circumstances of the saint’s martyrdom, and the rituals that have formed in that martyrdom’s wake.

Large-format Digital Prints, at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, as part of the "Gold Star" exhibition, 2007.

A series of large-format digital prints, each roughly four feet by five feet, relating images sprung from the brain of a cow with Mad Cow disease. The pathology of the disease finds correspondences with episodes of bovine mythology; echoes of the cow-gods Audumbla, Io, Hathor, and Kamadhenu are woven into scenes of the cow eating, drinking, stumbling, suffering. Two flanking prints depict the cow watching a cannibal spider preparing its web-wrapped feast.

Drawings on vellum, layered between sheets of plexiglass and illuminated from behind by lightbulbs, at the Pence Gallery, as part of the "TB9 and the Fiction Factory" exhibition, 2006.

The layered images were drawn from Google image searches. Each composite drawing was organized around the first page of results returned from a search for a particular word – for example, "dead," or "self-portrait." The work was partly an attempt to pull the digital flow of information back into the realm of the hand-made, and partly an attempt to discern the outlines of the new alphabet that could potentially emerge from the act of yoking images to words through search algorithms.

Multimedia Dance Theater Performance, at Dance Mission and The Electric Lodge, 2005.

A performance created in collaboration with Element Dance Theater. The dancers interacted with animated projections that teased out some of the connections between the art of dancing and the art of animation – one form based on the expression of motion, the other predicated on the illusion of it. At times vaudevillian, at times abstracted, it was ultimately pitched towards a question posed by William James: “Is consciousness really discontinuous... and does it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous to that of the zoetrope?”

Link to:

Review in CriticalDance

Comics, published in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, 2002-2003.

Over a period of two years, I did a handful of comics-related essays for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, in comic-strip form. I had the entire back page of the Book Review at my disposal, which, to a cartoonist used to working at pamphlet or book sizes, seemed like acres of space. I covered George Herriman's Krazy Kat, the publisher Last Gasp and the era of the Undergrounds, a comics show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Keiji Nakazawa's manga on the bombing of Hiroshima, "Barefoot Gen." Then, unfortunately, the Book Review lost their last page to full-color weather reporting.

Animation, featured on wildbrain.com, 2000-2001.

A series of 24 web episodes produced by WildBrain, each lasting roughly two minutes, scored by Ralph Carney. Romanov is a hapless protagonist with an ironed-out yin-yang symbol for a face. He routinely gets tripped up by a universe where metaphors tend to take on concrete existence. Episodes were screened at the Sundance Festival, RESfest, and won first place for Internet Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2000.

Link to:

Review at sfgate.com