No Mistakes In Jazz was my undergrad senior thesis show. It consisted of slip-cast functional pieces in a narrow color palette, each carved improvisationally by hand and named after words I heard while doing the carving. What follows is the original artist statement:
I've been playing guitar since I was seven. In the fifteen years since then, I've spent six or seven in various jazz bands and combos, as well as a small handful of rock bands. Ever since I learned how, my favorite thing to do has been to improvise. There's something expressive and freeing about improvisation that I find immensely rewarding - and I’ve never quite found the same satisfaction in learning other people's songs.
My biggest breakthrough in my visual art was realizing that I tend to approach it in the same way as I do music: improvisationally. The problem I had early on was that I would approach every step of the process in that extremely flexible, unstructured way, resulting in work that, while rewarding and enjoyable for me, was not particularly engaging and lacked direction. It was not a worthless experience for me, of course, but, much like when I first started playing guitar, it was only exciting to me and perhaps my parents.
What I’ve done in No Mistakes In Jazz is give myself a structure to explore; I think of each different form as one might think of different songs, each with a different “solo” in the form of carvings, which are also informed by a simple color palette. And of course, there’s no one right solo for any song, so I decided to repeat forms and explore the possibilities of each multiple times. Obviously some may be more successful than others, but then, that discovery is the whole point. This concept was the inspiration for my use of slip casting instead of wheel throwing; slip casting provides a way to make multiples of a form consistently and reliably, and allowed me to truly focus on the carvings.
In developing the carving style exhibited in this show, I have acquired an improvisational tool that can be applied flexibly, creatively, and repeatedly to any form, exploring its potential, while allowing the work as a whole to be structured and accessible.
Genuine art is a sincere representation of the artist, and the artist’s concept of the work is not to be discounted, as doing so would be comparable to discounting the artist’s whole being. However, any art must be able to speak for itself, at least to some degree, since its creator won’t be around forever. With that in mind, I ask my audience to consider my thoughts, but to gain whatever experience you may from my work, be it identical or contradictory. One of my favorite aspects of this body of work is the range of feedback I get - some say the carvings remind them of ancient writing; others, mazes; still others see it simply as abstract expressionism. While my perspective is vital to me, I deeply enjoy how readily interpretable it seems to be and I value the thoughts of others.
My work is functional and intended for use. If I can provide people with something thought-provoking to elevate their everyday experience, I feel I’ve done my job well.
Please enjoy.