I’ve been selected as alternate for the 2025-26 New Media Gallery exhibition residencies at the Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle. Over that period four artists-in-residence will produce work for their own exhibition. Being an alternate is an honor in its own right and I am in line if one of the original selections is unable to participate.
If a slot does open I would be creating a highly interactive installation, which is something for which I have spent the past 18 months developing both a new set of skills and several planned projects. An immersive installation would be giant leap for me from my two dimensional, static work–and this particular project would extend current thematic interests in a new direction as well.
We are surrounded by a chaotic mesh of made things. Each has a shifting gravitational force—insufficient to redirect ideology, the most massive construction of all. Yet we recognize neither this pervasive madeness nor its impacts on understanding our worlds. My work has addressed how overcoming this might help us to see more deeply and respond with new insight into what is revealed. This has led me to think about our complicity in—and the mechanisms of—accepting the self-censorship that our culture enforces. The combined impact of our individual acts is a social force that can only be diminished through personal commitments to more intentional observation.
My past work explored this in the context of what we do and don’t admit into our awareness of what is in plain sight. This project shifts the context to our less commonly considered auditory sphere. We may fight over what is music and what is noise. But even when we think of a sound as synthetic we don’t worry about its authenticity. Sound effects? We love them. We even laugh with the laugh track. We don’t gripe about AI sound the way we do about AI images or AI writing. Yet in no other sensory or conceptual space do our individual acts shape the shared experience so effectively.
