Curating as Method

I began as a documentary photographer's curator - trained to trust the image as witness. What I have come to trust instead is the encounter. Where do we take refuge when verbal language fails us - when what we carry cannot be spoken? We turn to art, to poetry, to music: not as decoration, but as the older languages - the ones we reach for to express, to understand, to explore what the sentence cannot hold. Touch is a language too. Over fourteen years, my practice has moved from photography through the full breadth of contemporary media toward the question underneath all of this: how do we communicate when words are not enough - and what does art know about this that we don't?
 

Lynn Margulis showed that evolution's decisive moves were not made through competition but through symbiogenesis: unlike organisms entering each other's lives and becoming, together, something neither could be alone. I take this as a curatorial principle. Curating, in my practice, is the deliberate arrangement of unlike things - disciplines, knowledges, species, publics - into proximities generative enough that something new must emerge. Not the exhibition as display, but the exhibition as an ecology of encounter.
 

This is why my work gravitates toward the thresholds where art converges with science and technology: sound as a medium that bypasses the sentence; neuro arts that make thought itself material; data given sensuous form; artworks made in and for outer space, where every human assumption about ground, scale, and orientation fails productively. And it is why I am drawn to more-than-human communication - to gesture, signal, resonance, and touch as forms of dialogue we might learn, and to the unlearning such dialogue demands of us. Language, for all its power, draws borders. I am interested in what crosses them.
 

Underneath all of it is one conviction: that knowledge is symbiotic, or it is dead - that art's most radical capacity is to hold unlike beings in relation long enough for understanding to evolve. I curate for that.