I really had no idea what I was getting into or how my creative paradigm might shift when I moved my studio to Bali almost 7 years ago. I anticipated that I would stay here long enough to shoot a series of portraits of Balinese women and then exhibit the prints upon their completion. While nothing has changed in my desire to work with exotic forms and presentations of beauty, everything has changed in terms of the subject matter that I am now focused on.

What is that you spend your time doing now?

At the moment, I’m spending most of my time searching for strange materials online, trying to entice leaders in the scientific community to cooperate with me, attempting to learn techniques of gold and silver metallurgy at lightening speed and organizing a symphony of workers, all of which I am taking on for the purpose of completing a new group of objects of art.

Do you feel as though you have tapped into a purpose, a passion, or a life’s mission?

My passion has always been creating, collecting and studying art.
I would say my purpose is to bring art into being.

Curiosity and experimentation have a lot to do with art and its creation no matter what the medium. In the physical sense of the word “space,” I’d say the Studio Loft which I had built out in New York City was critically important for enabling me to get a tremendous amount of photography work done. That studio was also a Salon space in the cerebral sense of the word as well. I was constantly inspired by my environment, and my talented friends and colleagues who surrounded me there. I will be forever grateful for those 10+ years in New York and for that city’s ability to push me relentlessly to become better at whatever it was that I was working on. New York allowed me creative freedom to find my direction in Art.

But, with that said, I think this interview is actually a good time to get out a message to my friends and colleagues overseas. Since I’ve been living in Bali for so many years now, I’ve been a bit out of touch with many of my counterparts in America and Europe and I think most everyone assumes I am still pursing photography, but this is not actually the case anymore. While I came to Bali to produce a series of photographic portraits and did in fact exhibit them at one of Indonesia’s top galleries, that series is perhaps the last professional exhibition I will ever hold. I have moved on to something much more important to me personally as an artist.

What then is the vision behind your current work?

The work I am doing now is focused on the amalgamation of art with science, history and mythology in a physical “sculptural” form (for lack of a better definition.) Some objects are made from the ground up and others are made by re-purposing one thing, adding something else to it in order to create something entirely new. Always focusing on the importance of the aesthetic of each artistic object and how it must be able to draw someone into it and show them something meaningful on multiple levels.

In terms of your current project and its process, what is it that you are most excited about at the moment?

You’ve caught me at a time where I am working on some of the most unusual and unique art that I have ever produced. I’d like to share something with you that I have only shown to a small handful of people. It’s one of the objects that I’m working on right now.

Just over a year ago, I sent a request to one of the world’s most respected meteorite collectors to ask him if he would allow me to cut and acquire a piece from his personal slice of an extremely important and well studied Lunar meteorite which was discovered by nomadic Bedouins in Morocco in 2007 and then classified by Dr. Anthony Irving at the University of Washington in 2009. After many months of negotiations with him, we finally agreed on the terms and I used a scale photo of his 72 gram slice of the moon, studied it on a computer and then chose the size and position of a disc shaped piece that I wanted to be cut out of it.

The cutter sat on the job for more than 2 months in fear of breaking or mis-cutting the lunar stone and it took dozens of phone calls and e-mails to push him to get the work done. He tried to cancel the job but I refused to listen to him. I just kept telling him to find a way to get it done. He finally figured out how to do it and managed to cut the stone about as perfectly as humanly possible. These photos of the lunar disc and its cutting process are the first that I have ever released.

Now that most of the scientific work is completed on this piece, the artistic portion of the work is fully underway. I am not able to show you any images of how this meteorite will be utilized in its final form because it is not yet time to be shown publically, but I would say that for me personally, this piece is one of the greatest artistic works I have ever produced. The medium is incredibly special and the way that it is going to be presented is aesthetically stunning and symbolically significant on a variety of levels - proportionally, numerically and esoterically.

I’d say the scientific community is in large part responsible for propelling my work forward in a direction that I am really inspired by right now. I regularly scan the media and receive weekly updates and bulletins for the most incredible advances in science and technology. I have been incorporating some of these modern technologies as well as some world altering vintage technologies into this current series of objects. Today’s communication and internet resources also makes information infinitely more accessible and that has been critical in creating my most recent work. The internet makes it possible to find and produce the most impossible things. It’s hard to imagine trying to find a piece of the moon or a gold plated hohlraum for a nuclear fusion target in the yellow pages.

The greatest challenge for me is getting the artwork which has been produced in front of the people who would appreciate it or be able to gain something from it by seeing it in person. There is more art out there than international venues which can appropriately allow the public to view it. I have always created art for no other reason than for my own self-satisfaction, but once it’s finished, it’s meant to be shared.

In terms of measuring success from my own artistic standpoint, there is really only one important criteria - I need to be able to surprise myself. If I can surpass the highest level I thought I could ever achieve and can look at a finished piece of art which I was responsible for creating and say to myself; I can’t believe I made that, then I’ve succeeded personally.

Your work addresses historical perspectives by the depth of understanding that you acquire in the production of your work, but also addresses fantastical ways of recognizing beauty, those things that are obviously beautiful, as well as those things that require careful attention – how would you describe the qualities that you aim to express in your current projects and work(s).

That’s an interesting observation. It’s true that I spend a great deal of time researching historical references before I start a new piece and beauty is a characteristic that I love to see in art. My latest work is engaging more enigmatic subjects with backgrounds that could be considered mythology or legend, but are undoubtedly based on some level of truth. The hard part is separating the facts from the fantasy since some of the historical information is literally thousands of years old and has gone through a lengthy chain in the telephone game. The goal is to create art with a scientific basis that also involves philosophy and symbolism meant to have literal, factual meanings as well as meanings which are open to interpretation. Through research, I attempt to understand the background and the facts of a subject as best that I possibly can. Once I have reached a point of understanding that I am satisfied with, I will go ahead and create the aesthetic and physical form for that object.

What is your current perspective on global affairs, the concept of a global community and the future sense of ourselves?

One of the advantages of living outside of the States is that I can actually get real news on world affairs here. The flip side to that is that the truth of world affairs can be pretty depressing sometimes. Humanity has reached a critical crossroads financially, politically, environmentally, ethically and so much more… all converging at the same time worldwide. You can’t help but to wonder if human beings have the strength, maturity and discipline to stop their own potential self-destruction and I do address that social thread in the artwork being produced now. I also can’t help but to consider what kind of challenges my daughter might have to face when she grows up. I suspect they may be much more severe than the generation that I grew up in.