Artist Statement

I am a Vancouver based multidisciplinary artist whose practice ranges widely and draws from many sources finding expression in painting, sculpture, video and installations.

My work considers the fallibility of memory and the elusiveness of dreams and weaves together recollections, hauntings, objects, personal and provisional historic events, coincidences into parafictional narratives in which fact and fiction entangle.

In my practice I rely on research to explore backgrounds and linkages. It is about collections of objects as allegorical devices and the play with the archive, the Wunderkammer and museological tropes. My practice is an examination of the potential of the narrative and its narrator(s) to reveal the wonders of the everyday.

In the use of the parafiction, wherein something necessarily can be perceived as true, but need not be necessarily true, I reveal the gaps in memories, histories and evidence. Those gaps act as points where a wedge can be placed that opens things up other interpretations and alternate realities.

My most recent works are fragile narratives that investigate our tenuous relationship to memories and dreams while referencing extra-corporeal (time)travel as a means to close the gap between ideal, perceived and reality states. Remote Viewer is a manifestation of one of these investigations, suggesting a time in the future where we require the assistance of devices to evoke what has been lost.

My fictions are acts of recovery. I approach them with sincerity. Perhaps this is a naïve stance in an era of post truth, “truthiness” and fake news. However, I believe that the playful employ of parafictions fulfills a longing for narratives that offer more nuanced views of how we are situated in the world and the possibility and belief in elusive horizons. An acceptance that meaning is wavering and that there is a constant and necessary oscillation between facts and fictions that the simple act of storytelling can reveal. It is a way for creating openings to re-engage with the sense of wonder.

I wish to seek out a playful and critical reengagement with the actual, with mystery, the sublime, beauty and the desire of wanting to believe. It is all about the joy of dropping one’s guard, even if just for a moment, to enjoy an experience in a state of sincere curiosity, in the power of playfulness of storytelling that reflects the inherent wonder and strangeness of our world.

“Memory isn’t accurate but it is true, it records what we feel about things not what we know”
– Hughie O’Donoghue