This site presents pretty much everything I’d done or made over the past 20 years or so. This is not a “greatest hits”; I’ve tried to be fairly completist, because I think it’s interesting to see the failures or less-successful projects along with the ones that really hit their mark. I’ve learned some lessons about art just by putting some older projects up on here that I had totally forgotten about, which were honestly not all that great, and precisely because of that they helped me see what to avoid and what to seek in future work.
So, browse away! Please click on the menu options above to see my work, which is helpfully organized by themes. A lot of my current work falls under the Paleontology and Geek Culture categories, but there’s also a ton of stuff under the various Miscellaneous categories. Those categories tend to overlap a lot, so for instance some projects could just as easily be in Statistics and Systems as they are in Games, Processes, and Performances.
A note on dates: This kind of goes against the grain of the art world, but I decided to not include the dates for when an artwork was completed or performed. This may seem odd, but I just feel like there is a weird tyranny of dates that permeates the art world and they shouldn’t really matter. Yes, they can establish a chronology so you can see what art led to what other art, and yes, they may show you how the art connects to other world or artworld trends. But a lot of the focus on dates comes from professional pressure–are you making enough right now to prove that you’re relevant for a job or gallery or press? I want to undercut those artificial pressures, which I think can have an insidious effect on art-making. These days I enjoy the freedom of approaching art as if it exists out of time. I like that you have to draw your own conclusions about whether something was made in 1998 or 2008 or 2018 or 2028, and that maybe you don’t worry about it too much, but that if you do, that it’s more of a game, destabilizing rather than bureaucratizing. That being said, you can certainly tell that a lot of the older work was photographed on what would now be considered super-grainy digital cameras, and the older video was originally compressed to what are now really low resolution video sizes in order to fit old computer processing speeds or my old website’s cache limits. I don’t have the originals to many of those videos any more, so what you see here is all that there is.
I’m going to wind up this page with a couple quotes that I like here:
An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he–for some reason–thinks it would be good to give them. Andy Warhol
The danger is in the neatness of identifications. Samuel Beckett
Chris Wildrick 