OPENINGS IN A WALL:
a multimedia installation for the defeat of torture.

To embody a world view that recognizes a vision of our human empowerment is the key issue that generates my artistic work. In Openings in a Wall, my central thrust is to create a cultural response to the presuppositions, beliefs, prejudices, and group aggrandizement that creates violence.

I am seeking to address through my work a new category within the contemporary art process. The streams of thought of late modernism/post modernism keep recycling design issues of color, materials, application, composition, and text. Inherent in much of these views are a separation of art from the existential experience of the world. An another major viewpoint is a political marxist slant. While offering documentation of horror or accusatory statements against the perceived ruling classes, the neo-marxist often fail to address the wider nuances of human interaction and individual decision making. While these viewpoints appear different on the surface, they both are linked in an avant-garde tradition that seeks to be outside or transcendent.

I do not hold society in contempt. My work acknowledges the ideal as needing to be tested in the crucible of experience. This currently leading me to work collaboratively with persons who lives address current issues in direct commitment. Douglas A. Johnson, as director of The Center for Victims of Torture, is such a man. In the art object created from this collaboration is a catalyst for bringing for bringing together divergent points of view. The work, in it's exact particularity and focus, avoids the pitfall of simplistic treatment of complex problems that neo-political work can fall into. Likewise, I am seeking to avoid the abstract surface treatments that can be devoid of real meaning for the viewer because what is being transcended is never stated or disclosed.

My work deals directly with questions of what is truth and harmony for a contemporary time. My commitment is to content as the embodiment of principle and lived experience. I believe, this commitment creates the theater for aesthetic consideration that is wider than theo