Songs
Inspiration comes from many places, the halls of museums, street corners, internet rabbit holes, or schoolwork. Featured here are songs and other works of art with short writing on how they relate to the ideas of the archive at large. I also explain my process and methods.
What is Life
By George Harrison
A central question to many of the works on this website.
This Year
By The Mountain Goats
A central focus of these works on engagement with the present moment and persistance.
Take Warning
By Operation Ivy
Both a call to action to center the values of advocacy and political awareness and a consideration of the future implication of our actions.
Background
This work is informed by my knowledge of psychological and biological sciences from studying at the University of California, Davis, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and Yale University. I study and theorize about how engaging with media, imagery, or a synthesis of different forms of art, storytelling, or interaction with people’s senses through artistic and cultural practice, like dance or caring for country, can bring about changes to human brains, cultures and societies.
For example, by surveying and collecting data about artists’ practice and art engagement, we could possibly learn about the responses of the default mode network to imagined task completion.(stimulating the cognitive processes involved in task completion through vicarious or symbolically-related directed actions/behaviors.)
I am also curious about how imagined social interactions and relationships that we form with fictional characters as well as the fictions we develop about our own life experience, inform our beliefs and have sociological consequences, such as social media addictions, the way misinformation spreads and sustains itself, as well as the ways that cooperation and community-based or traditional indigenous knowledge systems can support and inform the design of our urban and rural spaces, can reimagine health care and mental health rehabilitation, treatment and prevention, and make education more accessible and effective for people across many geographies, cultures. and societies.
My curiosities for the biology behind and cognitive functions/processes involved in the making and experiencing of cultural productions, comes from my connection to a long tradition of art with artist parents and grandparents and growing up in a rural community where many people made their own homes and the 10000 year long history of the local tribes inspired a reverence for their culture and persistence, especially in the face of historic injustice.
I am interested in the visceral emotional content that art and stories can carry, and how that would show itself in the subjective experience throughout people’s life courses. And I believe that creating more coherent and compassionate approaches to understanding and interacting with our environment and our psycho-social worlds, to contribute to improving people’s mental and physical health along with their socioeconomic conditions and ability to thrive.
"Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but
queerer than we can suppose…"
– J. B. S. Haldane 1892–1964
Scottish mathematical biologist
Process
These original artworks come from my experience working and studying and are made through a unique process of image and writing generation, where both inform each other.
The world is so rich and full of many ways of being. I think it is important to take lessons from those who came before, I get lost in art history and find myself wanting to reach out and feel the texture of the painting made in hundreds of strokes by someone hundreds of years ago. Art can travel through time to be right in front of your face, and can carry with it messages that if we just take one second to stop and reflect on and listen to, can change how we see the world and how we decide to live.
I am a fan of art across all medias and disciplines, I am heavily inspired by the work of those that came before and the beauty of the natural world. I hope this joy of creating is clear in my work and that other people get a chance to see you don’t need to do any one particular thing to be an artist, or scientist, or activist. You are important and your personal experience is important as you can help people through simply trying to understand them. Social connection can be the basis for art and art can be the basis for social connection, creating a world where we can work together to understand the best way forward.
I want to show the power of people’s attention, and make our stories the center of our experience because I saw the impacts of climate change personally, and saw how our psychology played a role in our unresponsiveness, or inattentiveness to the problems in that people face across the world and those at home. I believe art can fix this.
In an age of misinformation, understanding media and how our world shapes how we see things can help us find truth, make peace, and stand up for compassion and respect for people all over the world and from many different backgrounds.
Community-Based Approach
This is the beginning of a collaborative arts, culture, and science group, made up of animators, storytellers, illustrators, and people who are simply interested in making things or learning about people and the environment.
I want to see art, science and culture connect to make learning easy and fun.
I want to explore just how the brain works and how to use art to take advantage of our information processing systems to give us the tools to understand and coexist with the great big world around us.
