Through a reimagining of my bicycle experience within Southern California I have become interested in creating artworks that reflect and promote the bicycle as an avatar for art and life. In addition the bicycle also serves as a necessary utility within an ideological framework that challenges car centric assumptions within urban and suburban settings.
This experience and framework is what I refer to as the Department Of Applied Geography (DOAG) - a broader project that understands what I create as a response to research about the historical and spiritual implications of natural and man made landscapes in Southern California.
Within this exhibition DOAG provides the opportunity to explore the bicycle as I see it - a life art practice. The bicycle, its components and its maintenance provides a low cost opportunity for myself to meditate through tinkering as well as explore repair as a radical act of autonomy. DOAG further understands that experience between the human and their bicycle as meditative and a methodology for individual liberation.
I possess both an avocational and professional relationship to the bicycle. As a result I often find ideas for my creations through knowledge acquired from the kinetic joy provided through trial and error.
Antithetical to most of Southern California and the vast majority of the United States, the city of Santa Barbara California is somewhat of a cycling mecca. Not so much for cycling infrastructure but for the various people, terrains and neighborhoods that have forged cycling alliances, groups, gatherings and history.
