Presently I am applying for the Artadia grant for residents of San Francisco. I’ve been working on revising a 300 word artist statement. A wonderful byproduct of sorting out my computer files, and getting everything indexed on one machine is that I can see my growth. Below are a variety of iterations on an artistic statement of purpose starting with the most recent and working backwards:
October 2009
I am a blue whale with information filtering baleen who is constantly seeking a nutritious meal. My ultimate desire is to discover where abstract relationships inform and enrich so that all will benefit from my research and explorations. I create art to draw relevant connections and to comprehend the delightful complexities of life.
I strive to express my intent clearly so there is maximal perceptual effect with succinct and prescient information, regardless of the medium.
Interactive social space, the augmented reality of the ubiquitous Network, is my ocean. As boundaries converge between online and offline the essence of interrelated nodes is revealed. The strongest pathways are those that are nurtured by human interaction.
In my practice, photography and writing are constant while drawing, installation, and performance punctuate my narrative life-stream. Each lived act is a moment to make artistic decisions.
As an athlete I know that discipline and creativity go hand in hand. As an artist I train every day. By utilizing the camera and the Internet to increase my facility, the tools become transparent and embodied. Just as a basketball player responds spontaneously to a defender so does the artist to afferent stimuli.
I achieve success when my technique provides self awareness and the act of living leads to radiant moments of intuition. I am set free and liberated from the restraints of time and space to make artistic choices in the present.
The news become the nows: convergence and singularity come to fruition and temporality folds in on itself. Being and focus are only manifest from cyclical revisiting, assessing, and growing; an iterative process that advances the conceptual underpinnings of my work. When I effectively transduce the energy of inspiration to the generative moment that follows, the resulting forcefulness of expression is undeniable.
June 2009
The beauty of our earth inspires me, and I strive to acknowledge the wonders of the natural world by expounding on intuition while maintaining a clear focus on my life as an artist. As an athlete I understand the rigors of repeated practice, and it is undeniable that creativity and discipline go hand in hand.
I have an expanded view of the role of the artist, and as such I have executed projects that integrate digital drawing techniques, various mounting methods, collage, and found objects. My art is simultaneously influenced by technology, while intuitively responding to the embodied experience of life.
Each work has a self-contained reality and often a forthright sense of place. Through the choice of bright colors, condensation of space, and manipulation of visual cues, I create experiences that imply phenomena and images that exude their thing-ness. That is, the unique properties of the subjects depicted are emphasized. What my artwork lacks in verisimilitude, it gains in joyful complexity and honest wonder. I have been gradually getting larger with my practice.
Presently I am working on an ambitious four by eight-foot piece of paper, and I want to move even larger, yet I have run out of wall space in my bedroom.
I have continued to create new art through all of this, and still maintain an exhibition record complete with solo shows. My commitment to pursuing a life as an artist is unquestionable.
August 2004
Pete Ippel Artist Statement
Hypermodernity is the conceptual groundwork for my present body of imagery and videos, insomuch as it serves not only as a thesis, but also as an explanation.
HYPERMODERN: pronunciation: ‘hI-p&r’mä-d&rn. From Latin hyper-, and modernus, also from Latin modo, just now. 1 : above : beyond : SUPER- involving recent techniques, methods, or ideas : UP-TO-DATE.
In my own words: A forum for expression and research influenced by technology.
Whether the work manifests itself as a website, performance, action, sculpture, video or two-dimensional piece, it is likely touched by some aspect of mediation through the mechanical or digital. This mode of production has lead to an artistic practice and a series of works that speaks to the personal, yet maintains an open avenue for viewer affect.
May 2003 first year MFA review
Peter Ezekiel Ippel
PERSONAL STATEMENT
Issues of mediation, sexuality, technology, and computer / human interaction lie at the core of my work. Leaving behind the rural beauty of Ithaca, New York to live in the ultra-urban environment of Market Street, the busiest area in San Francisco, has led to analytical artistic responses where creative intervention in the cityscape is a primary concern. The constant inundation of imagery, the influx of information, and the decrease of human contact both in the physical and virtual world have acted as a catalyst that drives the artist to divert the bombardment, and solidify the role that an activist / artist plays in society.
Utilizing the web as the primary vehicle to promote and display artistic agendas, “hypermodern.net” acts as an online melting pot where the interplay among destruction / construction of identity, corporate fronting, and virtual space all combine to form an amalgam of artwork that serves as a forum to open communication and spark a dialog among those that view it.
For certain individuals Ebay has become a lifestyle, an extreme use of the service where people are a slave to their auctions, so dependent on checking up that it interferes with daily functioning. According the DSM-IV, the manual for diagnosing psychological disorders, this would be a criterion for a type of obsessive-compulsive behavior. Commodiphilia, diagnosed as assigning value to valueless objects in the off chance that it may be worth something to another disparate individual, is an artist coined term that references both the commodity, and the sexual perversion of pedophilia. “Obay.info” critiques the mega-consumerist culture that surrounds Ebay, and is both a visual pun and a cautionary piece that succeeds when the user questions why they are so involved with buying and selling of the most mundane possessions.
“Free Memory” is an event created to open a discourse between what memories consists of in terms of ephemeral human thought, and that of a data driven memory model of a computer. The event is initiated by the anonymous gift of a floppy disk to passers by and concludes when the box of disks is empty. Unbeknownst to the receiver, the artists memories, documented in photographic form, are present on the disk thereby transferring both ephemeral, and concrete memory.
A Perecian celebration of the everyday, “Market Street All-Stars” elevates the members of the1049 apartment building by placing them in their own online comic book series. The stories driven by actual events will humorously depict what goes on in these single men’s lives with an edge of social commentary and tongue in cheek gravity.
Most recently, identity and signifiers have become paramount in the conversation between the warm organic body the cold flatness of the machine. Rejection, rejuvenation, and the sloughing off of routine have resulted in the video documentation of internal contradiction. The disparate relations among the individual personalities mediated by their conversations result in a series of short pieces that enter the greater mind space of day-to-day existence in a confusing technological world.
It is becoming more apparent that the Freudian and Lacanian discourse revolving around humor, respect, and social status are currently of the utmost concern. Literally playing the role of the jester, humorist, asshole, and nerd all has allowed for explorations into other art making practices separated from those bound to the computer. By unplugging, the same concerns of mediation, sexuality, technology, and computer / human interaction are examined in a more visceral and perhaps more thorough way.
October 2002
Issues of mediation, sexuality, technology, and computer / human interaction lie at the core of my most recent work. Leaving behind the rural beauty of Ithaca, New York to live in the ultra-urban environment of Market Street, the busiest area in San Francisco, has led to analytical artistic responses where creative intervention in the cityscape is a primary concern. The constant inundation of imagery, the influx of information, and the decrease of human contact both in the physical and virtual world have acted as a catalyst that drives the artist to divert the bombardment, and solidify the role that an activist / artist plays in society.
January 2002
During my undergraduate years, I have developed my academic, artistic, and visual concerns in a manner that is both representative of my growth as an artist and as a person. As I have been engaging with my surroundings and creating works it has become evident to me that I am interested in three main juxtapositions: memory and fantasy, virtuality and reality, and tactility and non-existence. These relationships deal with perception of surroundings, and when combined with narrative and the art object have led to many successful works.
As a dual degree student at Cornell University, and the owner of my own business, I have had the opportunity to explore academia and the professional world to a great extent. I am enrolled in two colleges concurrently (College of Arts and Sciences in the psychology department, and the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning in the fine art department). My goal when I decided to take this course of study was clear. I wanted to draw as much from the university as possible, while maintaining a rigorous academic schedule, and having a full life within the Cornell community.
Clearly, I have maintained that vision, and this spring I will be continuing to pursue the digital realm with upper level classes in three-dimentional animation and digital music composition. The instructors are leaders in their field, and I am quite excited to develop my skills further. My own thesis show, scheduled for May, will maintain it’s current trajectory down the digital path, and this spring’s projects will be a progression toward an installation that will be both thoughtful, and provoking.
The ambition that I have to continue my education at the graduate level is unparalleled. As the book is closing on my career at Cornell, I look forward to continuing my studies that will lead to a masters of fine arts degree. The constructive criticism that I will receive from peers as well as faculty will be invaluable in the continued discovery of digital media. With the constant shifts in technology, as well as the social climate, there is no doubt in my mind that I will be working hard at documenting, exploring, and experimenting with the contrasts in life. As a professional, practicing artist, I have the desire to push the perception and interpretation of digital art and to question what is acceptable, while continuing to delve into the relationships between memory and fantasy, virtuality and reality, and tactility and non-existence.