"Ghost Galleries" is an ongoing series of speculative photographs of gallery and museum spaces in which the exhibited art has been erased, leaving a few ghostly traces and highlighting the gallery itself as the object of contemplation. The erasure process creates the aura of computer-generated architectural simulations, exposing yet another ghost: the ideal space that underlies the fetishization of the White Box. In some of these photographs, such as Ghost Gallery #7 (above) the erasures have been carried out in such a way that new elements arise, causing the images to shift into a terrain between photography and painting.

Above is the new work I created for the 2009 Laguna Museum exhibition "WOW: Emergent Media Phenomenon". It is a four-panel digital print totaling 2 feet by 12 feet. The idea was to explore the complicated relationship that develops between players and their avatars, but from the avatar's point of view. So it begins with how the avatar views the player and the player's artificial world, as if the avatar were the protagonist and the player were the toon. At the same time it acknowledges that the two (in this case, a female Death Knight and a male gamer) are one, existing as a kind of functional temporary split personality. The piece includes an overlay of running text in the form of an internal monologue/dialogue of the avatar/player. Below is a detail of the lefthand section of the piece, followed by a photo from the show's opening night (courtesy of Eric Stoner).

"Ghost Galleries" is an ongoing series of speculative photographs of gallery and museum spaces in which the exhibited art has been erased, leaving a few ghostly traces and highlighting the gallery itself as the object of contemplation. The erasure process creates the aura of computer-generated architectural simulations, exposing yet another ghost: the ideal space that underlies the fetishization of the White Box. In some of these photographs, such as Ghost Gallery #7, the erasures have been carried out in such a way that new elements arise, causing the images to shift into a terrain between photography and painting. Ghost Gallery #3 (2007) is above; other images in the series: Ghost Gallery #4 (2007), Ghost Gallery #7 (2008).

This piece is an informal mandala that I made using rock salt, once among the most valuable substances in the world and now used for such mundane purposes as de-icing roads. (I recommend the book Salt by Mark Kurlansky for anyone wanting to know more about the surprising history of sodium chloride.) I created a digital print of the installation for the New Year of 2009 in the hope that it would be a year for revaluing the ordinary and the overlooked.

Necexxitol Ad

By now just about everyone has seen those tv ads about something called "Restless Leg Syndrome"... and possibly wondered why they had never heard of it before. In 2008, I saw a rerun of a "Wired Science" special program from 2007 on the efforts of drug companies to find new ways to sell drugs originally developed to treat rare diseases. One way to expand the market for an existing drug is to define a new, treatable problem; another is to foster the idea that a relatively uncommon problem (like, say, RLS) affects practically everyone. But what if "Wired Science" didn't get it quite right? For a closer look at what the real problem may be, click on the image above...

Seek Justice 2001

I created this poster about two weeks after 9/11, in response not so much to the event itself as to the sense of rising hysteria all around.