Asking oneself “who am I?” is something we all do but in today’s culture you could imagine some people having multiple answers for who they are depending on where we are talking about.

When I looked in the mirror a few years ago I asked myself a slightly different question, I said “Holy shit, that’s me?!”. This has happened many times to me; confused by the person in the mirror. It’s me, no doubt, but it’s not who I feel I am. In wanting to get to know this exterior me I have taken it upon myself to create a series of portraits that will take many years to execute. The plan is to create the 21 human facial expressions that psychologists says we are capable of. To do this, I’ll create 4 large portraits that together create an animation of each expression. In the end there will have been 84 self portraits made within the series.

Here's the latest expression, Happy.

This expression series is part of my Goodbye Art 2 series and each set of portraits is being systematically destroyed. When the 21st expression is created you will be asked to decide if the final expression should be destroyed or not. That is expected to happen some time in 2020.

I’ve always been drawn to photographs by Edward Curtis. They seem to capture a place and time that seems even distant beyond the years when the photos were shot. I remember reading at one point that Curtis would embellish some of the pictures with items he had collected on his travels visiting different tribes and how he would occasionally manipulate photos in the dark room. I remember a pang of discomfort when reading this. On one hand he was attempting to create more authentic photos but in doing so he removed their authenticity which causes us to question even more about his photos and practices.

I’ve always been interested in how we imagine things in our minds. And at this moment, I’m curious how we build models of people or cultures if we haven’t witnesses them first hand.

The image we have of unvisited cultures is often built by pictures and stories we encounter. But what if the people sharing those stories haven’t had direct experience with those cultures either. What then?

This series, Joyful Tune, was created by bringing together the script of Disney’s Pocahontas and the photographs taken by Edward Curtis.

Each image was planned by hand and then sketched onto a sheet of paper. That paper was fed into the typewriter and the script typed over it. The sketch was then erased.

This project started innocently enough. I wanted to see if it was possible to create a skull chair that was satisfying to look at. I don't know why I became obsessed with it but I noticed that there were two types of skull chairs out there. One type had a skull on the back rest of the chair so when you sat in it you covered it up. The other had the face of the skull on the back of the chair so if you sat in it like a normal chair the skull was facing away from you and probably back against a wall. There were other variations but those were the main problems. So I started coming up with ideas.

The first step was to just do a ton of drawings of different options. I quickly noticed there weren't a ton of options and pretty soon I wanted to sit entirely in the skull. This lead me to a gamer style chair, low on the floor. After that it became a long game of designing it, figuring out how big it needed to be, making models and solving for x. Eventually I was able to get started. I decided to do many layers of 2x4's glued and screwed together. This was more approachable for me as I've worked in layers in other projects and I wanted to have a chunky fragmented look to the final piece.

The first few layers coming together. I'm trying to figure out how to get it done.

Here are the two middle sections. I had to get them put together first and lined up perfectly. Then complete each half from there. This way when I brought them together they would not be misaligned.

Clamping gluing and screwing

The jaw is held on by just a few bits. That hole you see is the armrest.

The first half completed

After the stop motion was captured the final layer had to be held down overnight with weight as it wasn't screwed on.

The final video with stop motion