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Portrait c.1990

  I have long considered the mixing of media, materials and even styles to be an expression of my hybrid identity.
  Initially attempting to fuse painting and photography by applying photographic emulsion directly to canvas before painting, and a series of experimental dark-room techniques I collectively refer to as "Photograffiti", evolving into a fusion of painting and film-making, imagining the screen as canvas.
Due to extensive overpainting during the production process, the works undergo radical changes in appearance that constitute a documentary "narrative" armature of the films, upon which the conceptual (Nãmarûpa) preoccupations of semiotics, symbology, various writing systems and letterforms are built.
  While I have continually referenced many artists and figures from popular culture, (largely for their allegorical value), my greatest inspirations and influences are Joyce, not only for the theory of aesthetics but for the virtuoso juxtaposition of styles and Hendrix for the complexity of composition and tightly controlled, eloquent abandon.
  My profound intrigue and fascination with the visual density and beautifully enigmatic, ineffable yet implicit semantic meanings of: epigraphic inscriptions, various calligraphies, mathematical equations, illuminated manuscripts, heavily tagged graffitied walls, etc. lead me to investigate semiotics, symbology, writing systems, letterforms, etc., exploring the duality of the borderlands between looking and reading,
and an examination of the very "meaning of meaning".

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
~ Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
from the Letter "To A. Stuart, 1791."