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Overall, my experiences at Columbia's School of the Arts were huge to me. Meyer Shapiro, Peg Weiss, Kurt Varnedoe and Andre Racz were a few of the personalities I was fortunate to come in contact with. They were all extraordinary people who were as different from each other as night and day-yet each was completed by their passionate endeavors, styling their life around their words and actions. The impact of their words and passions has left a lasting impression and has helped me enormously.
At the studio in Prentis Hall, several impressions remain vivid. One was, of all things, the echoing sounds of the electronic music department that drifted down the empty halls. These swirls of synthesizer sounds were, in that day and age, quite esoteric and very experimental. Today, they are relatively commonplace. But, in 1976, along with the nuclear warning signs that were posted in the halls of the building, these sounds gave an eerie feeling late at night when I was musing on the state of my art endeavors.
It is curious that music and particularly abstract sounds that I use in my pieces play such a pivotal role in my creative process. It is as if we students were sponging up everything in our environment-the big and the little things that life brought about at Columbia and New York City.
My current work focuses on the activities of a collaborative group known as Polis America Studios. The group explores mobile concepts in art experiences. We emphasize new possibilities of extending art beyond museum and gallery walls in a portable form. Projects include The Yellow Trailer Art Gallery, a mobile work of art, whose recent exhibitions explore the trailer's traveling installation properties and the group's found object, photographic and super 8 filmmaking work. The studios' goal is to explore the spaces in between traditional venues for art experiences and activities.