Education Portfolio

The story of sleeping as performance art is not entirely unique. It’s the message conveyed through the performance that truly makes it an original. I have always been fascinated by the notion of “home.” Is it a physical place, a building, a structure, a house? Is it a state of being, a sense of safety, of being provided for, of identity? These are questions myself and others ask regularly. What does it mean to be homeless: practically, spiritually, or emotionally? We see them huddled on the street corners, searching for cans in the garbage, holding signs aside the freeway, resting in the grass in a nearby park. In nearly all highly populated areas, homelessness is a fixture of life. The Reno Area Alliance for the Homeless estimates 3,000 people are living in a temporary situation around Reno, including in a motel, a shelter or on the street. For most of us, the homeless man, woman or family we see on the way to work every morning is nothing more than part of our daily routine. The a...

"The Drafting of a Man" This completely unoriginal piece of artwork uses the tradition of Dada, pop-art, and any number of art movements that have utilized collage, to develop a composition using only found imagery and objects. I started by exploring local thrift stores and garage sales to find the work of art that speaks to me. Then, using only found images from print sources, I recreated this art with new image layers, subsequently shifting the conceptual nature of the work. In this Dada inspired approach this piece lacks reason and logic, prizing irrationality and intuition, nonsense. For this art to be called nonsense, it should fulfill no legalistic criteria whatsoever. Each piece of random nonsense incorporated in this piece depends on another piece of totally unrelated, utterly nonsense which preceded it. Sometimes in ordinary usage, nonsense is synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous. The concept of work in this random nonsense art technique is not obvi...