Overview

     Everything is a negotiation, whose outcomes affect the trajectories of our narratives, individually and collectively, shaping what we refer to as history. My work visualizes the intersecting and unfolding of narratives as a result of negotiated decisions, exploring the contexts and the interests that influence how those decisions, or negotiations, are made or conducted.



Definitions

    A Negotiation is an exchange between two or more entities to arrange, settle, or pursue particular interest by way of mutual agreement.



Elaboration

     We believe that our lives are the sum of the choices we make. We forget or ignore that, truly, our lives are the result of past and ongoing negotiations concerning various interests and how those negotiated choices impact us personally and/or culturally as they unfold over time. Everyday we negotiate about something, but not all of us are aware of precisely what we are negotiating for, or of how we are negotiating for it. My work addresses this lapse of consideration concerning this continual and universal human behavior, using diagrammatic and metaphorical imagery as a means to enlighten and empower viewers. Depictions of negotiations, their interests, and their narratives illuminate how and where we overlap with each other, and how and where we diverge. The narratives involved in the negotiation process become even more interesting when human content is put into a transactional context. Whether to fulfill a need or a desire, there is a narrative in front of and behind the negotiation.  As creatures with free will, what we negotiate for, how we negotiate for it, and why we negotiate for it become very interesting considering that at a moment of choice, there lies before us multiple possible outcomes.  How did we come to make the choice(s) that we did?  What was the interest being negotiated for?  How would our lives be different had we negotiated differently?  Art allows us the possibility to view these different outcomes simultaneously, and to learn from those possibilities.


   

   

Artist Statement(s)

CV


“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”

  1. –– Jorge Luis Borges “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

 ––Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar