The
paintings, sculptures, illustrations, and comic strips that comprise
the 'juvenilia' portion of my website are selections from a body of
work I created while I was an undergraduate student at Princeton University.
While I was there I became involved with the Program
in Visual Arts, and I took advantage of the resources and facilities
it provided. I particularly enjoyed my classes with painter, John
Obuck, and sculptor, James
Seawright, whose individual interests in art helped shape my own.
Their generosity of spirit and support for my "work" fortified
my enthusiasm for (and confidence in) my own artistic production. While
Princeton is a not exactly an art school, my experience of the Visual
Arts Department was extraordinarily enriching, largely because of the
instructors. I formally majored in Art History through the Art and Archaeology
Department.
As I look back on my experience at Princeton it is easy to become wistful:
I see remnants of a past belonging to someone who was seemingly stronger
and more fearless about self-expression than I am now -- and perhaps I
was a better artist in that way. When I was making things, I had a sense
of purpose that I had never experienced in other classes, and this feeling
was intoxicating. I didn't really have a concrete set of conceptual concerns
or technical interests while I was there, but I was turning over ideas
all the time. I feel that my artistic production was provoked largely
by the conditions of my environment. Most undergraduate students were
in the grip of strictly academic course loads, but the Visual Arts
Department was underpopulated and overflowing with supplies, and its
studios were large, expansive and bathed in light. The department was
a great place to be. Similarly, Princeton was always being remodeled and
renovated and as a result the campus was spilling over with found objects
and 'ready-made' discarded material, which were rich fodder for sculptures
and ad-hoc installations. I was simply delighted to engage with the brute
force of images and objects. My projects allowed me to conceptually undermine,
challenge, and find meaning in my experiences. I think that art production
was just a way for me to further process the raw material of my life.
As a result, it was undisciplined, diverse, and passionate.
Back then,
there was little physical distinction between having and idea and making
that idea into an actual object. It seems that I rarely hesitated in my
desire to make an idea real because I never worried about failure, rejection,
or criticism. However, as I think about it, that last statement is a romantically
artificial construct of who I remember -- or want to remember -- myself
to have been. In fact, I think I must have felt like the ultimate, soft
embodiment of failure, rejection, and criticism: the art I was making
was the resulting product of that anxiety and rage. As a result, the period
of time that I was making things at Princeton was very much a response
to a feeling of inadequacy and frustration. While I remember feeling incredibly
stifled at Princeton, and refused to see myself as part of its cloyingly
pampered student-body, I think that sense of being marginalized made me
feel more raucous, reactionary and deliriously self-aggrandizing. Princeton
was a controlled environment where I could take creative and experimental
risks. Like many young adults who are at college, I think had reached
a point where I wanted to stop repressing myself, and to shake off the
dead skin of youth. Making things wasn't about being a good artist; it
was about surviving one's sense of self by re-creating it systematically
in the conceptual and practical world.
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