 So I feel like I've embarked on a bit of a fool's errand here because I'm going to try and summarize about a decade worth of work in ten minutes or so. I'm looking at the clock right now, it's very intimidating, but hopefully you can walk away with an understanding of what I'm doing here in the first place, what my work is, and how it relates to floating in general. So I'm a visual artist and as a result I'm aware of many hats. I'm a printmaker, an illustrator, a designer, a muralist, and I'm also the manager of a community print and wood shop here in Portland. And there's also responsible for this behemoth behind me as well as the conference poster and the t-shirt which was designed along another artist, Victor Rios, who's also in Portland. So there's a visual thread that works its way through all of these things, it's a part of a larger body of work of mine that spans about ten years. So if we go back in time a bit, perhaps an edgier carter, definitely a younger carter. I was a recent transfer student at the Main College of Art and Design and I had just declared a major in printmaking and I remember a professor was prompting our class of mine on a long-term project and the idea was to select an action of some sort, any kind, small, large, and then to repeat that action over the course of several weeks and then to allow an accumulation of experiences around that action to inform a new body of work. So essentially put simply it's just a way to, an action-based approach to making new art. And so at the time I was new to Portland and I was looking to better acquaint myself with my new surroundings. I had never lived near the ocean, which I fell in love with, and I also had a growing awareness and concern for climate change issues and particularly those we're experiencing in the Gulf of Maine. So for my action I chose to go out and explore the many coastal pockets of Portland and Greater Portland and in doing so to pick up trash. It was kind of a modest act of remediation. And so as you can imagine I found garbage and the garbage was bagged up and brought to my studio for as long as my studio mates could tolerate the stench of low tide, which is not very long. And then of course it was discarded properly and recycled as necessary. But there was a reoccurring set of materials that kept showing up that caught my attention and that was ghost gear. So ghost gear is a fishing industry term, for those of you who don't know, for abandoned, littered, otherwise lost gear that's left adrift in the ocean. And oftentimes what happens is it clusters in bays. There's a group in Portland that's actually identified several in Casco Bay that are upwards of six tons. But of course it's also strewn about around our beaches and the coast in general. And so I became interested in these materials because like many plastics they become so abundant and commonplace that they have seemingly become part of the natural landscape. Or at least they become part of our experience of coastal landscapes. I also fell in love with coincidentally the visual qualities of these materials, particularly rope in general. The way I was finding it was in the state of decomposition. It was frayed and it, when it unraveled, it produced this complexity of line that I thought resembled branching patterns that we often see in nature. And so I started making these heavily layered, brightly colored screen prints, similar to the one that you're seeing behind me, excuse me, where I would use the materials themselves to expose screens, which allowed for this kind of infinite library of silhouettes to layer with. And for those of you unfamiliar with the process of screen printing to the left here is an image of an actual screen with an image burned into it. And what's around it is a hardened emulsion. And then in the middle here I'm actually squeegeeing ink through that screen, which transfers the image onto paper. And this is the way that the majority of these works are made and still made to this day. So in retrospect, this is some older work. I think what I was trying to do was visualize this sort of horrible, yet fantastical future in which our waters had become entirely composed of plastic and sort of clusters of these plastic had become these amorphous kind of shape shifting creatures of sorts. So around the time of my junior year, through some research I was doing on human consciousness and altered states of consciousness, I came across sensory deprivation and floating as a sort of concept. Unfortunately at the time there was no publicly accessible way to float here in Portland, but I was lucky that I made a connection with a professor who knew someone who actually owned a Samadhi tank and it was in there, one of the apartments they leased out. And so the tenants would operate it as sort of a small business, I think to help offset the cost of living. So I was able to flow a number of times by trading art. And it was lovely, I fell in love with it. And needless to say, it started to show up in my work. So this is a piece titled The Tank, pretty directly inspired by that time. And I started to float more, to do more research, to continue to work in the vein of GoSkier. And it all culminated in my final piece that I displayed at the Maine College of Art and Design for my thesis exhibit. And that was titled The Spiral. So this is a 40 foot print on sanded mylar, double sided, that I suspended as you can see in a kind of spiral formation. And then projected color changing LED light through it. And it was also accompanied by a ambient soundscape of sounds that I had captured during the making of the piece itself. So kind of this meta soundscape, if you will. So following the display of this piece, I graduated from the Maine College of Art and Design. I continued to develop this work and my studio practice in general. And notably in 2016, just a year after, I was the first ever artist in residence at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. And so I spent about four months there working with one of their senior research scientists, as well as some research staff, trying to find a way to translate their research on ocean acidification into an immersive art experience. And this was the result. This is titled Color Cosm. So you can kind of see it in a similar vein to the previous piece, expanding on those ideas, but also trying to tell this very abstract story of their research and also our conversations, broadly speaking, on the intersections of art and science. So shortly after this was made, I got a call from someone at Mecca who was putting alumni in touch with new opportunities. And they had said that a couple had opened a float center and they were looking for an artist to display work in exchange for a few floats. It turns out that was James and Amy Harder, who I'm sure is somewhere in the crowd here. They become my dear friends and are really the sole reason that I'm up here talking with you today and that my work is featured to the extent that it is. So a big thank you to them. They're really lovely people and dear friends of mine. But we've had the pleasure of working on a number of projects. This is the prints that we first displayed. And this was a light box that they have in their personal collection. And I feel really fortunate because our friendship and our work together has given me a routine supply of floats. So for the past six years or so, I've had the opportunity to experiment with floating as a tool for just general wellness and for creativity. And it's informed my work in a multitude of ways, both visually and conceptually, but for the sake of time, I think I'd like to share two major types of experiences that I've extracted from those experiences. And the first one is deep rest and recovery. And I think all of you can probably know how that's beneficial to everybody, so I won't go into that too much. But what I will say is that whether you're an artist, an athlete, a plumber, everybody stands to benefit from intentional periods of rest, both physically and mentally. The second type of experience is deep focus. And so I've found that the quietude and the darkness that float tanks can provide us can serve as a kind of vessel for amplifying our imaginations. I find that when I'm floating, I'm more rapidly able to render or imagine new ideas. I can work through new compositions and imagine new forms. And I think even solve problems and sort of consider possible failures in order to divert from them in the studio. So if you allow it to be this, I think it can be a facilitated problem-solving space. So about the end of my time here, before I go, I just want to share a favorite quote of mine that I think summarizes all of this in a sort of nice package. Finally enough, it's from Moby Dick, which I read when I first moved to Maine, thinking that it had something to do with Maine. I was like a young college student being like, this would be really cool if I had this information. Of course, it turns out it has absolutely nothing to do with Maine. And it's incredibly long and tedious to read. But I now have a lifetime of Melville quotes to annoy people with. So here we go. Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold. For there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. And I think that you can remove the concept of bodily warmth here and insert any emotion or sensation, and this still holds up pretty true. It is kind of a binary, but for me it's provided a kind of guiding sentiment that I have used in just my general understanding of the world and also my pursuit of creativity. You know, I think it's beautifully exemplified in floating in particular. We sort of seek respite from the sensory chaos of being alive. We shed a few layers in the darkness and the quiet, hopefully in order to gain a bit more grace, understanding, an appreciation for the light and the sounds, and perhaps a bit more creativity. That's all from me. Thank you so much.