COMPLEX PROCESSES SCULPTING INFORMATION LIVING PICTURES
Once upon a time, before art sorted itself out as a category for me, I would be taken to the Los Angeles County Art Museum by my parents. They would drag me through the galleries of 1960’s masterpieces, and then we would go outside and I would climb on concrete replicas of giant ground sloths. Tar pits, concrete animals, and the county art museum merged into an idea that art, while serious, was properly something to play on.
In the early eighties I was designing sets and costumes for dance companies, and painting little paintings in an apartment in New York City. My images were full of dancing figures and urban grids. One day, I put the two together. It is great to have a quiet place to concentrate and think, well organized with all your tools at hand. But outside, the rest of the contiguous world becomes part of the work, and the work part of the world.
I was hooked on working out there - in prisons, woodlots, abandoned buildings, community centers, on refridgerators, public transit, baby lima beans... Nearly twenty years later I got a masters degree in landscape architecture (Harvard GSD, 2002). My capacities and curiosities had expanded; I wanted to know, in practical ways, how things are put together and why the spaces we live in look as they do. Now I work across these two approaches – art and design – using both toolboxes, testing each through the lens of the other.
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Everyday life should be infused with art - the grace of things well done, the folly that exceeds practical solutions, the true potency and depth of the things which surround and support our lives. By integration with our environment, art projects can share with other activities the refinement and conceptual complexity of art. An everyday experience becomes a rich circumstance, rewarding interactions, encouraging sensitivity and openness, empathy and generosity.
The images in my work are drawn from local circumstances and are tailored in scale and material to harmonize and amplify their contexts. Acting like seed crystals, they provoke the thoughts of viewers, who then extend the meaning of the artwork in their own perceptions and activities.
My natural curiosity leaves me open to many things but fundamentally my passion is for culture. What do I mean by that? the path by which patterns and meanings are married to physical things; how objects are at the same time also processes; why close attention to the crafts of building and the courtesies of interaction is both necessary and useful. In a world of nationalist and individualist icons my interest is in something more fluid and negotiable: the gratifications and insights of sharing and doing work with others. 
For my CV please click HERE
CURRENT/RECENT
Coming Soon: Natural Discourse: Artists, Architects and Poets in the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden.
Photographs of the Endangerbuses may be seen at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, August 22nd through September 30th.
I'll be speaking about endangered species advocacy at Counterpulse in San Francisco on September 14th, along with Brent Plater (Wild Equity Institute) and Jessie Raeder (Tuolumne River Trust).
By way of celebrating the Magna Carta coming to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, I led two
L E T T E R F O R M workshops on June 5th . Contact me if you'd like a copy of the handout!
One of my photographs of Endangered Species buses (but not the one above) was shown at the San Francisco Zen Center April 29 to May 29, part of an exhibition called "Sweetcake Enso." The exhibition is traveling to Zen practice centers around the country.
Endangered Species, my proposal for San Francisco public transit buses, is on the streets of San Francisco from mid-January on. Look for the project website or for endangerbus on Flickr and Twitter.
The proposal was also publlished in Bay Nature Magazine in their winter 2010 issue. For more on the project, download the ANTENNAE essay below, or contact Community Initiatives to help get it done!
ANTENNAE: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, published my essay "In and Out of Place" in their issue #10, Heat. The essay outlines the potential for public transit to connect animal and human communities, conservation land urban infrastructure. Download the article HERE.
TREASURE ISLAND BICYCLE RACK COMPETITION: My design is one of three finalists in a competition to create a signature bike rack design for Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. Two prototypes have been installed on 6th and Market Streets. See SF Bicycle Coalition Treasure Island page.
Thinking Through Nature: Philosophty for an Endangered World, University
of Oregon 19-22 of June, 2008. Todd presented a paper titled Iconic
Comensalism: Public Transit and Endangered Species. See
www.uoregon.edu/~toadvine/TTN/
Resiliance Art Exhibition, at Resiliance 2008, an international Science
Conference. See
resilience2008.org/resilience/?page=php/art