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.

Looking back on my art making I can start to make some definitive statements about my work (one of the great pluses of getting older). Two things come to the surface: my younger realization that putting one disparate idea next to another can often produce an idea that can be both interesting and long-lasting seems to hold true. And, twisting conventions, that is, using new platforms for communicating my ideas —an experiment in finding the edges of these new ways of communicating— is rich with possibilities.

I began as a photographer in the 1970s and immediately started experimenting with the medium: blueprinted images (cyanotypes) on canvas to making another 19th century process, collotypes, bend to my 20th century aesthetic (an utter failure, by the way). But it was the experimenting that proved to be the most important thing I learned in graduate school. At first, I wanted to be a “good” artist. So I began to look for a recipe for that success. Yet, my teachers kept asking me questions I couldn’t answer. What I didn’t realize, at first, was these questions had no right answers. That set the stage for the rest of my life.

Take a look at what I’ve been up to in my art practice:

• The Chamomile Tea Party: Creating Calm in Contemporary American Discourse
• Jeff Auctions His Demographics on eBay
• Dichotomy: It Was a Matter of Time and Place, a 9/11 Storytelling Project
• My Tweet Tooth: Jeff Tweets His Dental Procedure Live to Dentists Across North America
• In Our Path: A Photo Documentary on the Building of the “Last Freeway” in Los Angeles
• ArtFBI: Studying Stereotypes of Artists in Contemporary Culture