Artist's Statement

My work explores the nascent dialectic between naive eccentricity and self-referential parody in the creation of an institutional persona. The "Zymoglyphic Museum" is both a site-specific environmental installation and a transgressive multi-media institution that blurs the boundaries between the display space and the creative process; it operates as a syncretic amalgam filling the interstices of creation and curation.

The paradoxical conjunction of the museum is further compounded by the museum's quotidian architecture and anodyne siting on the one hand, and, on the other, its fermented holdings, its fabled grotesqueries, corrosive stochastic processes, and unbridled entropic transmutations, all enveloped in an overarching serendipitous miasma.

The museum confronts contemporary art's expectation that it provide a cultural critique, perhaps by subverting the role of museums as authoritative institutions, or by questioning its Eurocentric appropriation of Asian cultural paradigms, or at least commenting sardonically on consumer waste and the destruction of the environment; instead, the museum merely indulges in transcendentally whimsical sesquipedalian revelry.

[T]he "artist statement" [is] a contested site of practice, a discursive form where writing meets (or, variously intrudes upon, supplements, contextualizes, contradicts, enhances, extends, or gestures toward) visual arts production and exhibition. In the context of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, the artist statement (which more conventionally introduces, contextualizes, and describes an artist's work for public exhibition) has the potential to become both a vehicle for creative inquiry and an alternative to more traditional means of academic dissemination.

-- W.F. Garrett-Petts and Rachel Nash, "Re-Visioning the Visual: Making Artistic Inquiry Visible" Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 18 (2010). Retrieved 15 Nov 2012

I started out collecting stuff, assembling it into artifacts and dioramas, and the idea of a museum just seemed to grow out of that. The museum is like "outsider art" in that it arises out of some inner compulsion for creative expression, but it also is interesting to think of it as a "total work of art" made up of lots of intertwined themes in a variety of media. The museum can contain natural objects, things I have made, and, to a lesser extent, things others have made.

People are often surprised that the museum itself is simply an 8 x 12 shed in a driveway in a suburban neighborhood. It has in it a lot stuff that people might consider weird or morbid - taxidermy, insects, rusted and decaying objects. I use a lot of things that might be considered garbage by others. I'm inspired by a lot of Asian art which simply presents natural objects, especially weathered ones, as worthy of contemplation.

While there are certainly cultural issues that could be inferred from the work, my approach is really just following what I think is personally compelling, including any excuse to use big words like "sesquipedalian!"

For more information, see How the museum came to be