statement

As we live, we record.  We try to remember, and we leave traces.  We construct the narrative of our lives from a collection of memories of key events. While these memories allow us to create a personal identity, there is a multitude of experience that is not preserved.  Over time, we have developed strategies for creating more sophisticated records and distributing them more efficiently.  Technology allows the ephemeral to become tangible.  Books solidify the thoughts of one individual or group to be shared with another, and the actions of a musician's hands are contained in the perforations of a piano roll.

In addition to creating our own records, we interpret and interact with those provided by others.  I am fascinated by ragtime, a musical form that preceded jazz and was developed in my home state of Missouri.  While many ragtime composers remain relative mysteries, they have left a wealth of physical artifacts in the form of early records and sheet music.

The opportunity to combine my love for musical composition and drawing enticed me to produce cut-paper animations.  Mediated by the flow of time, both animation and music exhibit similar traits in the manner of their origin and eventual perception. After taking thousands of photographs documenting the development of drawings and the events that transpire in these constructed spaces, the connections between the process of animation and the ways we form our cultural and personal histories became clear. In the creation of an animation or a history, certain individual instances are marked for preservation, but the vast majority of the process is a continual flow of moments hidden from view. How much has been lost, preserved, excised or manipulated to alter the narrative, and what traces have been left?

bio

education

University of Kansas, MFA, 2014
University of Missouri-Kansas City, BA, 2011

selected awards/honors

Best Animation, Crown Heights Film Festival, 2013
Southwest Missouri Museum Associates Purchase Award, Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri, 2010

selected solo or two-person exhibits

KU Art + Design Gallery: Paper Trails, Lawrence, Kansas, 2014
Wonder Fair: A Night of Animation and Syncopation, Lawrence, Kansas, 2012
Kansas Union Gallery: Jonathan Metzger and Brian Hawkins, Lawrence, Kansas, 2011

selected group shows

FiveMyles: Crown Heights Film Festival, Brooklyn, New York, 2013
Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts: Darkness at the Edge..., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2013
Wonder Fair: Print Invitational, Lawrence, Kansas, 2012
Springfield Museum of Art: Missouri Oklahoma Arkansas Kansas 4-State Regional Exhibition, Springfield, Missouri, 2010