Jeff’s Art Projects
Even my most ardent supports turned squeamish when I decided to tweet my root canal live. Some people just don’t like dental procedures showing up in their Twitter feed.
The wonderful thing about getting older is that I’ve lived history, both society’s and my own. I’ve been making art for over four decades. That span allows me to look back to see my trajectory as an artist. My early realization that putting one disparate concept next to another could produce something both exciting and long-lasting has held true. Twisting conventions and using new platforms for communicating my ideas—an experiment in finding the edges of these new media—is rich with possibilities.
After studying political science at Michigan State, I made a significant shift and received an MFA at UCLA in photography and graphic design. I wanted to become an artist, but I had no idea what that meant. As I look back, it was perfect timing. The mid-1970s introduced new technologies with which to experiment. I made videos with “small” porta-packs from Akai and Sony. And I took the first computer graphics class ever taught at UCLA in 1972 with filmmaker John Whitney, Sr. The computers in the engineering department looked like airplane traffic control monitors, round green vector screens. Even though they constantly broke down, they planted a seed that would germinate decades later.
After school, I started teaching college photography. But I also turned my sights to something very different for me. I was one of the first artists-in-residence in Self Help Graphic’s Barrio Mobile Art Studio. Four artists would go to schools and community centers in East Los Angeles, using an old UPS van as our portable studio. I was the photography teacher in our group, along with a painter, a sculptor, and a puppeteer. My darkroom was the inside of the van.
My art, which began as an exploration of myself, turned outward, connecting it with the larger world around me. Working in communities I live in, both in real space and online, has been the thread that connects my work.