Biography
American, born 1970 Cleveland Ohio
Bachelors of Fine Arts, Major in Painting
The Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA), 1993
My formal education was in painting with a minor in printmaking. Most of my early work as a student was figurative. The stongest influence in my education came as a mobility student at the Lacoste School of the Arts, France. I had gone for a six week summer program and ended staying for six months. Upon my return to Cleveland I resolved myself to returning to France after my BFA.
Upon graduation from CIA I got a position as the painting assistant at the Lacoste School, then affiliated with CIA. The day after graduation I was on a flight back to France.
This was the begining of my three year sejour in France.
Stimulated by the rich historical environment and different
cultural perceptions, I began experimenting with new ways of creating and perceiving art.
This dramatic change and exposure opened up a period of
experimentation and discovery.
I began to focus on my body as a central and significant element in the creation of images. I wanted to extend the limits of the canvas - open the space and step into it. I was questioning the entire process of painting and awakening to a physical desire of engaging my entire body in the creation of the image. Taking literally the enscription on the Musee de l'Homme in Paris.
"Each person is created as they breath,
without knowing it.
But the artist feels himself created
and his act engages his entire being"
Many of the artists who influenced my demarche
were not very well represented in an American arts education. Artists such as Yves Klein, Gina Pane, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Gunter Brus and the writings of Antonin Artaud and Les Situationists International all came to have a great importance in my development at that time. See links
The early photographic works focused on issues of sexuality, identity and gender.
I experimented with using models other than myself and came to realize the
importance of the gestures being something pure and inexplicable.
Just as Jackson Pollock's engagement with his canvases in space, gesture and rythm,
I was entering the space of the tableau using the camera as an objective
viewpoint for an engagement of body, space, gesture and light. 
Upon moving to New York in 1996 I continued to develop the photograhic works but
felt a need to extend the gestures of the studio photos out of the frame and into
live action. The early performance actions were in many ways hommages to my
artistic inspirations (right). Using the basic materials of the painters studio and
performing with canvas paint, gesture and light these first actions began to
define for me what was essential to the performative works. The Vienna Actionnists worked with performance as an extension of the act of painting into live experience. The documentation of their works were sometimes displayed as works of art themselves. I had come from the opposite direction. Using photography as the singular manifestation of my actions, and then expanding those gestures to a real time experience. The documentation of the performances posed questions for me that I had not faced. Was the documentation of the performance actions art? I knew that for my performative work it was most important that the action was witnessed, but I was dependent on video to allow for a greater dissemination of the actions. It was with this dilema that I began to focus on ways of integrating the performance actions with the video documentation itself.
The first attempt at integrating performance and video was a performance in
Germany entitled Nacht Augen (left). I was using video feed back of my live
image to create a video loop, or video feedback. A digital camera captured
my gestures and they were imediately reprojeted back over the space of action.
The reprojection being captured again by the camera and projeted back onto the
space of action with a slight delay the image creating an effect of disintigration of the image. The basic
principle of Nacht Augen was used in a different configuration to
create Penumbra. The initiative to integrate video and performance lead to my recent work with the video actions.