 Innovative Solutions LLC
Biography I make multiple-media sculptures, installations, and collaborative public works that explore hidden histories, collective social concerns, and controversies about sex and the body. I live in San Francisco, and teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz as Assistant Professor of Art. Artist Statement The year I was born, the House Committee on Un-American Activities collected one million names and the Readers Digest index started to list "Psychology" in its index. By the time I reached puberty, "Sex" became a regular topic, offering my parents reliable articles on frigidity and morality. Sex and war are indelibly linked in my imagination. All my work is informed by three decades of participation in feminist, left, and gay activism, art, and publishing. The theory, debates, stigmas, and social interaction of these arenas leave their indelible stamp on the components and processes of my work - from bathroom graffiti about racism to interviews about desire. I make art with the belief that these experiences, though frequently marginalized, are the raw materials for important visual communication to a wider audience. Mostly viewer activated, my work brings together a mix of visual and written/spoken media: projected imagery, sculptural forms, text, video, sound, and electronic components. The technology I use juxtaposes equipment from the recent past with contemporary electronic technology. My subject matter grows out of a collusion between site and historical research, stories from my life, and stories from other lives I encounter. The resulting narratives form a layered exploration of both memory and record - an uneasy alliance between private and public voices that address a space where repression encounters desire. My adult desires are firmly rooted in the technology that first seduced me as a child: the box record player where I spun my 45's, a transistor radio playing He's a Rebel, the black telephone through which I eavesdropped on the party line. The year I was born, computer calculation was in its second year. This older sibling grew up with me, alongside my desiring machines. My work now holds the alchemy of this relationship: electronically altered sound and image coming through archaic machines, computer chips embedded in nostalgic receptacles, the mechanical body with a silicon brain. If military power fuels technological growth, desire is certainly its motor. People invent what they want to play with.
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