 The most central beliefs about art is that we have it specifically so that we can deal with things for which any other type of language is somehow incapable. I mean, I think that what I can say to you with my words is about this much. What I can give you through the work that I do is quite a bit larger, and I really believe that that's true for all of the art. So there's a bit of an inherent contradiction when I'm asked to come and speak about my work because, as I just said, it's really non-verbal. It's not about language. So I'm going to be showing some slides and some video clips behind me, and my advice would be, if at all possible, consider paying more attention to what's behind me and less attention to what I'm saying if that's at all possible. A second really core belief that I hold is that whatever an artist is, whoever they have become at the moment that they complete a work of art is what that work of art will always contain, and that can be simple, it can be complex, it can be cynical, it can be happy, it can be almost anything. But it always abides in that work from that point on. I happen to be, by personality, a type of individual who really cares about the old questions. Where did I come from? What am I to do while I'm here? What if anything happens when I leave this form? And I think I might have made a fairly good monk, but I think I had three children by the time I decided that that might be a possibility. I work in very small scale. I'm a self-taught, I'm a sculptor, I use primarily wood, sometimes combined with found objects, but it's basically small scale carving. So that's all I'm going to say about that. You'll also notice as the slides go through, there will be a sudden unexpected change. I will not be talking about that. You'll notice it when it happens. I'll give you some understanding of that a little bit later in the talk. And suddenly, for some unknown reason, I felt very called to try and explore visual art. And I knew, as I said, very little about it. So the first thing I did was I decided to go and just look at everything contemporary that I could find. I went to the galleries, I went to the museums, I read art magazines, and I looked at all of this stuff. And the first thing I noticed was that I didn't get it. I could not connect with it for some reason. Whereas with literature, with music, with theater, with poetry, I'd have this thing that hit me right here. And with visual art, that did not happen. And my assumption was this is because I am failing to understand what art is about. And I think that was a correct assumption. I really did not understand contemporary art at all. So my first two years as a working studio artist was really spent in educating myself. I decided to study art history with a very specific emphasis on modern art history because that was the period in which I was working. And with an even more specific emphasis on contemporary critical theory because I discovered early on that that was what was driving contemporary art. And after having studied for a period of time, I decided that what modernism had done, this period of about 100 years of art, was very much similar to a child taking a clock apart in order to understand it. And I think that's a very legitimate, a very intelligent, a very worthwhile thing to do. And that's what modernism did. And we can think about that disassembly of art in order to understand it as having broken it into three basic areas. And we can call them head, heart, and hand. Head is the intellectual component of art making. And it's when you're really in your conscious mind and you're trying to think about what it is that you're creating in the world. That eventually becomes conceptual art, the dominant form worldwide. If you go to any of the big box museums pretty much anywhere on the planet, what you're likely to be seeing is what we refer to as conceptual art. The second form, heart, is the emotive content of art making. It's really how the artist feels. And it can be kind of a very powerful expression directly onto a canvas. But it's expressionism, it's a way to emote onto the canvas. And the third type of art making that modernism was broken into is hand. It's the technical side of art making. And that eventually for some reason becomes kind of the bastard child of the other two. It really, it so drops out of favor that we almost don't see it. It becomes what we refer to as craft. And it's very poorly regarded in the art world. So when I looked at these three possible avenues to pursue a career in art, I was not attracted to any one of the three. And what I decided to do was to attempt to recombine them into a single form. And that that form would be sent around this core group of interests of mine, which were basic life questions, very humanistic questions. That's what I did from about 1980 until the year 2000. I simply explored those questions in my work. And that went along incredibly well. And here's the moment where I'm not gonna talk about this for quite a while yet, but this is a moment we'll come back to. So at the end of that 20 year period, I had a very, very nice career. I had a lot of support. It was really a good career. I had no complaints about it. And I had also never really been blocked as an artist. Around the year 2000, I experienced a total creative blockage. And I suspect that the creative people in the room either have a fear of that or they've experienced it. And it was absolutely complete. And I feel like I'm a fairly smart guy. And so I thought I can work, I can think my way out of this. And so I proceeded to do absolutely everything I could do. I made scale changes, I changed materials. I brought different intellectual things into my world. I changed the way I lived. I closed my major studio in downtown Los Angeles. Really changed pretty much everything, none of it worked. And at the end of a five year period of really just a very painful struggle, I one day had to say to myself, that's it, I am no longer an artist. This thing that I've devoted my life to is now over, I can't go on. And it was painful to say it, but it was also extraordinarily liberating. I just felt this burden removed. Suddenly I did not, I don't know what the non-artists in the audience think art banking is about, but it's an incredibly difficult thing. If you're doing with diligence and devotion, it's quite a hard job. And so I suddenly had that relieved, it was relieved from me. I did not any longer have to do this kind of work. And about three days after I said, I'm not an artist, I'm gonna start some kind of new life, I went to bed at about one o'clock in the morning. I had at about two o'clock in the morning, I felt this push. And I was pushed back into consciousness in a very strange way. When I awakened, I was in contact with my dream state. I now know that this is called the hypnopompic state. It's a state where we're bridged between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind of the subconscious mind, the dream world. And in that state, I could see a new world that I'd never seen before. And it was very, very complete. It had characters, it had architecture, it had landscape, things I'd never seen before. It had art forms that I'd never seen before. The one thing I was familiar with was that these were my characters who were inhabiting this world. But they moved, and that's the critical thing. It was an amazing opportunity to stay in contact with the dream world. And between about two o'clock in the morning and about 5.30 or 6 in the morning, I simply looked at this world and attempted to memorize it. I just wanted to see and remember every single detail of what was in front of me. About 5.30 or 6 in the morning, my wife awakened. I was literally afraid to move. I asked her if she would bring me paper and pencil. And I started writing down the things that I had seen and as much detail as I could possibly capture. I was in that state of suspension between the dream world and the waking world for about 12 hours. It simply didn't go away. Now this is technically known as the hypnopompic state. And ordinarily we just get a tiny glimpse of that. But in my case, I was suspended there. And at the end of this one, I'd captured as much of the information as I possibly could. I realized I was now going to embark on a professional life as a filmmaker, as an animator, doing stop motion animation with these characters that I've created. And from that moment until this, that's what I've worked on for the last five years. I have worked day and night, 12, 14, 16, 18, 24 hours a day, trying to bring this into the world. And I'm doing everything entirely on my own. I create the figures. I build the sets. I create the lighting system for it. I built a theatrical stage on which they move. I've created the animation. I've taught myself how to use Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. And in the end, I've been able to actually put together these short films that are meant to be very much a kind of visual poetry. In the beginning, I thought that they would tell the story that I had seen in this dreamlike state, because it had a very strong narrative. It had a definite beginning, a middle, a lot of action in the middle, had a clear ending. And yet when I started to make these things, they took over and went in the direction that they wanted to go in. They really became their own personalities. And I realized that they were not actually telling stories. They were kind of visual poetry. And that this notion that I would be a filmmaker in the sense that I would make some kind of theatrical release film disappeared. And I realized, OK, what I'm doing is making very short films. And I'm trying to capture in those films, going all the way back to what I first said in the beginning, I'm trying to catch something very human in these films, basic human questions. Now, whether I'm doing that succeeding or failing is really for other people to figure out. But this is what I've been called to do. And this is what I've been doing. As I said, I've been working almost six years on this project. At the end of that six-year period, we've completed about 12 and a half minutes of footage. I had the opportunity of exhibiting this footage for the first time a few months ago in an important museum in California. And people responded to it incredibly. I wondered if I could actually hold people's attention with a non-linear, non-narrative story. It's a sort of oxymoron. I'm not telling a story, but I am telling a story. The content, the feeling, the kind of emotional state that we fall into when we're being told stories is what I found in these works. And at some point, as a creative person, I had to step back and look at these things objectively. And I just thought, I don't know where these are coming from, but I really like them a lot. And that's sort of where I am with this project at this point. And it's been really interesting to be exposed to this incredible body of people who are doing things that are very tangible in terms of changing the world.