Sentient Art explores a new visual theme to document and record meaning in the modern era.

Sentience is the capability to reason, to feel, and to be globally aware. I seeks symbols and metaphors to understand modern life on a global scale – the rocket flame, the living plant, the fossil. Sentience moves away from illusory or pop surrealism to discover fundamental everyday symbols that connect us. Similar to the original surrealists which sought the “real functioning of human thought”, Sentient Art seeks direct symbols of modern reality to understand our shared connections and suffering across cultures.

Sentience seeks a new visual perspective on global change.

Untitled. Sentient art. Drawing on paper. 2015

Seeing the Future. Sentient Art. Drawing on paper. 2017

I consider these to be the first fully realized works of Sentient Art. The origin of this work begins in 2011, as I was seeking to move away from technology-based media and rediscover my purpose in the visual arts. The initial realization was that I wanted to move away from pop surrealism, from the paradoxes of commodified lowbrow art. Large scale, unpainted canvases rested in my studio for five years. By 2015, after many sketches, this new work resolved the issues of appropriation and symbolism that I struggled with. The process of symbolic simplification, among other techniques, allows us to remove spectacle, and identify the shared symbols that are present everywhere in the daily life of our modern world.

For more background, see the related page on:
  Pre-Cursors to Sentient Art: Background & Context.

New works to be exhibited at FM Oakland studio in Oakland, CA through 2019.