My creative practice involves taking on diverse roles that permeate the walls of my studio, such as such as private detective, archivist, magazine staffer, factory worker, oral historian, film director, or sound engineer. To conceptually connect the various projects across these different contexts, I have created an umbrella organization for the various strands of my practice, the Institute for Clew Studies (ICS).
ICS is an ongoing art project exploring the quotidian moments, everyday lives, and granular histories that saturate the vast expanse outside the more sparsely populated realm of what is considered “important” in the annals of the human endeavor. How is a life defined or remembered beyond data or public record and what can we infer about a life from the spotty information that is often buried in random archives ? I call these micro histories “CLEWS”: facts, memories, habits, characteristics that add up to define human experience but are too numerous for absolute documentation and, thus, lost to time. Our contemporary word “clue” is derived from the word “clew”, meaning a ball of yarn. In Geek mythology, a “clew” leads out of a labyrinth, which is how we have our contemporary meaning something that leads to a solution. Taking the labyrinth as a metaphor for life, I consider CLEWS to be what brings us through the maze of our existence, guiding between what is memorable and more commonly chronicled.
ICS consists of different divisions: archive, research facility, meta-office, detective agency, time machine; all filtered through the creative context of an art studio. The ICS projects generally involve three stages: research, creative production, and public presentation. I mine historical archives or research a topic for forgotten stories, arbitrary connections, or orphaned ephemera that evidence poignant moments (banal, poetic, humerous, mysterious). Using the research material as prompts, I creatively contextualize the information in artworks (installations, performances, conversations, texts, drawings, video, lectures, objects) that occupy various points along a continuum between fact and interpretation. Acting as a representative of ICS, I share the work and the mission of ICS in some sort of public, interactive, or collaborative way.
ICS is an ongoing art project exploring the quotidian moments, everyday lives, and granular histories that saturate the vast expanse outside the more sparsely populated realm of what is considered “important” in the annals of the human endeavor. How is a life defined or remembered beyond data or public record and what can we infer about a life from the spotty information that is often buried in random archives ? I call these micro histories “CLEWS”: facts, memories, habits, characteristics that add up to define human experience but are too numerous for absolute documentation and, thus, lost to time. Our contemporary word “clue” is derived from the word “clew”, meaning a ball of yarn. In Geek mythology, a “clew” leads out of a labyrinth, which is how we have our contemporary meaning something that leads to a solution. Taking the labyrinth as a metaphor for life, I consider CLEWS to be what brings us through the maze of our existence, guiding between what is memorable and more commonly chronicled.
ICS consists of different divisions: archive, research facility, meta-office, detective agency, time machine; all filtered through the creative context of an art studio. The ICS projects generally involve three stages: research, creative production, and public presentation. I mine historical archives or research a topic for forgotten stories, arbitrary connections, or orphaned ephemera that evidence poignant moments (banal, poetic, humerous, mysterious). Using the research material as prompts, I creatively contextualize the information in artworks (installations, performances, conversations, texts, drawings, video, lectures, objects) that occupy various points along a continuum between fact and interpretation. Acting as a representative of ICS, I share the work and the mission of ICS in some sort of public, interactive, or collaborative way.
