ARTIST STATEMENT:

This project required 790 hours of fabrication, 13 gallons of acrylic paint, 3,300 feet of electrical conduit, 1½ miles of copper wire, 1,200 board feet of lumber, etc. But, why go through all this effort to create and present physical work when the Digital is so much more accessible? Why is physical artwork even relevant today as so much of cultural discourse occurs in the Digital?

The Digital is not foreign to those who have inhabited and currently inhabit modern academic environments. The new practices of academia are transpondences via email between professors, students, and clubs; they are list-serve blasts clogging the data highway, papers and assignments planned, researched, crafted, and submitted without even a thought given to paper and pen. Despite the digital’s gradual takeover, the Studio Arts at Hamilton remain grounded in the tradition of the hand-made and the real. This physical, museum-based presentation, awaits digitization; this body of works awaits its transcendence to the Digital; it awaits the cellphone-camera- conversion to .JPG and .MOV. In their physical state, these works seek not to justify the physical production and presentation of artwork but rather to contextualize this physicality within our increasingly digital academic and cultural practices.

These works made possible by the generous support of the Steven Daniel Smallen Memorial Fund.