In Real Life: My Life and Work in 3D Design the Visual and Performing Arts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the significant help and guidance I received from Professor Alvaro Barbosa, PhD, Dean of the Faculty of Creative Industries and Dr. Thomas Daniell, Head of the Department of Architecture and Design at the University of St. Joseph in Macau, China in the preparation of this manuscript. In addition, I owe a great debt to the knowledge shared while being employed at Orrin H. Riley Art Conservation and in consultation with my former wife, Elizabeth Estabrook and Sandra Amann at Amann + Estabrook Conservation studio in New York.

Bail Out, 2010 installation for Boffo, Brooklyn, N.Y.

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

On reflection

EARLY WORK IN SCULPTURE

Balance and the nature

of physical systems

MAKING ART

IN THE SOCIAL FORUM

Performance works

LIGHT AND DYNAMIC MEDIA

Work in Video

Development of a Video Image processor

The Development of Andro-media

Collaboration with David Hykes.

Studies in the visualization of sound

Mercury scanning and

the performance In Light of Sound

THE EMOTIVE POWER OF FORM

Night Yearning

The Sleepless Nights Left Behind

Private Parts

Bloody State

from the project, Amerika

REFERENCING SOCIAL

POLITICAL STRUCTURES

Two works of social history from

New York's Real Estate wars

"The Horizon is Nothing More

than the Limit of Our Sight"

Shake Up!

The Waterline Project

Bail Out

NeoCon Light Camo Structure

CONCLUSION

My work as an educator

Education

Presentations and projects

Honors and Awards

Timeline

INTRODUCTION:

On reflection

The neighborhood where I grew up in the 1960’s, is an Italian American enclave known as Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, in New York City. This was a low-income, working class neighborhood. There was a scrap metal yard next to my apartment building. I remember it well because it had one of the last remaining working horse carts in New York. Every morning the horse and driver would leave the yard to collect scrap metal and every evening the cart would return filled with the discarded materials of urban life. The odd pieces of metal, the old items scattered among the piles of debris instilled in me an early interest in working with materials. It gave me a sense of the latent potential of found objects to evoke memory and associations1.

At this time my interest was confined to making small collections of the more evocative pieces I would find in this my urban playground. My formal study in the arts began at the State University of New York, College at Purchase, along with classmates like artists Jon Kessler, Polly Apfelbaum and Fred Wilson. We studied with the American sculptor, Tal Streeter, American photographer and musician John Cohen and learned printmaking with the Uruguayan-American printmaker Antonio Frasconi.

1 Wikipedia: Ron Rocco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Rocco

Soliloquy 1999

These artists made it clear that inspiration led the way to creation, that one need only to follow the light of interest to find a path. My first reflections on the motivations behind an artist’s desire to create are found in my diary entry of 1973, when I wrote about the inability to truly know the mind of another. In this contemplation of my lover, I spoke of the "trap of the mind and pondered that I could never be in her mind and know that at the same moment she was equally in love. I noted that although her actions and words spoke to me of her affection, I could never know for certain that the thoughts and feelings we ‘shared’ were in fact the same. In this speculation I saw the artist’s motivation as an attempt to liberate oneself from this trap of the mind and attempt discovery of singleness, a oneness of entity. Not to know exactly what another is thinking, but to free you from your mind and set thought and feelings into another’s mind through the senses. In this I felt an artist must be able to see areas of knowledge that are seemingly diverse. One needed to be an artist in relevance with his time. And at that time, I believed that one achieved this by employing, artistic economy through simplicity of detail."

Untitled 1 1975

  Study for Untitled 1 1975

It was at Purchase that my first work in sculpture Untitled 1, was inspired by a memory I had as a young boy. My grandmother had died and at the wake, which occurred at her home in rural Pennsylvania there was one wreath of flowers unlike all the others. This bouquet was in the form of a Star and Crescent and it was this combination of shapes that launched me into my first sculptural undertaking in 1975. I guess I could call this strong connection between an event, my emotions and these shapes, the emotive power of form. There has been this strong connection between forms and feelings present as a driving force in many of my projects ever since.

Progression 2001

Recently, the term "confessional art"2 has been used to denote artists who included autobiographical elements in their work. The symbolism of French-American sculptor, Louise Bourgeois, the designated founder of confessional art, relies on knowledge of her biography, or so says Richard Dorment of London’s The Telegraph newspaper 3 . As defined in one article:

"Confessional art is a form of contemporary art that focuses on an intentional revelation of the private self. Confessional art encourages an intimate analysis of the artist's, artist's subjects’, or spectator's confidential, and often controversial, experiences and emotions."

Certainly, as this term is coined, many of my later undertakings produced works with autobiographical references that would qualify as "confessional art". Although I am put off by the Catholic connotations of the term, there is truth in the fact that many of my more significant art works adhere in part to this categorization. My goal in this writing is to shine light onto the motivational forces at work in my oeuvre be they autobiographical, or inspired by external learning and to analyze my role in the contemporary landscape of artistic production. In this attempt to understand

2 Encyclopedia of Identity /Confessional Art, Ronald L. Jackson II & Michael A. Hogg. Pub: 2010 http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/identity/n45.xml

3 The Telegraph / Louise Bourgeois invented confessional art by Richard Dorment. June 2010 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/7794168/Louise-Bourgeois-invented-confessional-art.html

Element 1986

my life’s work in visual media and the performance arts, we must look at several threads; a search for simplicity of form, a desire to unleash the emotive power found in objects in referencing autobiographical subject matter, and the idea of a social role taken by the artist in contemporary society. I used to worry that if I was not making art then I was wasting my time, doing nothing, being unproductive, wasting my talents. This as it may sound, was acquired guilt learned as a result of many factors, my Roman Catholic upbringing, the