Whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real; whenever an object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us, and we believe it.                         - William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)

Throughout my life as an artist, I’ve found myself attempting to develop a work that is immediately believable yet eventually deceitful.  As my experience with tools and techniques has migrated from the sculpture studio into the digital realm, I’ve found that my hope to obtain that nearly perfect, alternate reality has become more of a possibility.  The innumerable amount of tools that exists in the digital medium has helped me realize that I can represent nearly anything on this planet in a multitude of alternative forms. 

It then comes as no surprise that I’ve always had an interest in the American still-life painter, William Michael Harnett (1848-1892).  He was famous for his reinvention of the Trompe L’Oeil (“to fool the eye”) style of still-life painting.  Harnett’s paintings of objects from the life of the bourgeois class were rumored to trick viewers into thinking that it was not a painting on the wall, but actual objects hanging in front of them.  Although he lived more than a century ago, Harnett was living my dream – he was creating a reality that wasn’t there, through his struggle for perfection, deception, and representation of desired objects. Harnett utilized illusionistic techniques by demanding that his viewers straddle the fence between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional world.  With Harnett as my guide, I have aimed to perform a Trompe L’Oeil – leading the viewer into a new realm of alternative representation, channeled through digitally rendered images, sculpture, video, and sound.