220 artworks
After the SFMOMA guerrilla installation, a three-part series attempting to bring photographs back into painting 'didn't all work out' — followed by writing ~30 ideas about art, which became the seed of the Breaking Down Art series.On a Rietveld Akademie school trip to the Venice Biennale, photographed material for Breaking Down Art from inside the Arsenale while simultaneously shooting the Venice DCS scene from just outside the same building — unrecognized as a doubled operation until this session.At 19, having only ever lived in San Francisco, Bolter thought of the city as comparatively 'small' — not rural, but young and undense next to the old European cities he was reading about. This sense of San Francisco's smallness surfaces in The Thinker's invented crossroads town.1996, right before leaving for Europe: a recurring refusal to fully render or engage the thing you were about to leave. The SFMOMA action hung a bronze figure turned away from the museum; Antiquity, painted the same year, left its Acropolis a white ghost rather than a rendered building. Both readable as the same gesture at different scales — institution and tradition — right at the threshold of departure.Around the same time as Space Time (1993), the artist tested figure painting in a small cluster of works (The Stage, Corner, Self Portraits 1993-1995) before settling into cityscape/landscape work, which came more easily. In recent years the artist has felt a pull toward learning portraiture, drawing an analogy to learning singing versus learning an instrument -- believing landscape, like an instrument, offers external structure to lean on, while portraiture, like the voice, has nowhere to hide a weak line.Left Hoge School voor de Kunsten (Utrecht) before completing the program after finding the teaching inadequate; began self-teaching HTML and CSS directly from the W3C specifications during the same period. Worked briefly as a junior art director at a web company before the dot-com bubble burst, then joined the Global Peace Walk 2000 partway through its east coast leg, walking with the group into New York and settling there afterward -- the period from which Transition and the first Art Collision works emerge.Left Hoge School voor de Kunsten (Utrecht) before completing the program: the concept-based curriculum was a shock, and in practice felt like cover for the teachers not teaching technique. Began self-teaching HTML and CSS directly from the W3C specifications during the same period. Worked briefly as a junior art director at a web company before the dot-com bubble burst, then joined the Global Peace Walk 2000 partway through its east coast leg, walking with the group into New York and settling there afterward -- the period from which Transition and the first Art Collision works emerge. Leaving Europe was felt as a real loss at the time, not a simple redirection: having longed for and gained entry to the European art world, encountering its actual mechanics in practice -- subsidy-dependent shows staged and photographed as proof of funded compliance rather than made for a public audience -- felt like reaching the end of the road and finding the wizard behind the curtain. Art Collision's DIY, self-organized exhibition network (New York artists plus contacts at spaces in Holland) was a deliberate alternative built in response.