Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger Hunt

Artist Statement

            Have you ever watched Toy Story 3? Do you remember that scene where Mr. Potato Head sticks his body parts into a tortilla in order to control it, effectively making it his new body? What if he'd done the same thing with a corpse, or more interestingly, a living human being? These are the questions that, while perhaps they don't keep me up at night, I do think of them when I should probably be getting more sleep. It is these questions that I'd like to explore through my work, expansions of throwaway observations that suddenly bring into sharp relief the implications of interest made in the mundane and ordinary. Put more succinctly, I’m that guy who starts his sentences with “Stay with me here, now what if.” The one that takes a relatively innocuous situation and pushes it to its extremes to see where it could lead.

            A source of inspiration for this questioning mindset could’ve come from the-now defunct thespark.com’s Stinky Meat Project, chronicling the daily degradation of a plate of raw meat left to rot outdoors, as well the chronicler’s reactions. Everyone knows that a plate of raw meat will spoil quickly if left out, but to see it in all its 640x480 glory, day by day? That is an example of a new experience being born out of a simple situation taken to its furthest ends. Showing people the ideas hidden within the things they’d never given thought to in the first place.