Exhibition Aqua, an Auto-Tonic Reverberations Production, Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, Opening night

You seem to rely on coincidence quite a bit in your work, describe its significance.

I try to focus my exploits on the coincidental rather than the ironic which, to me, seems to marvel at the simple idea that everything and anything can be metaphor, whereas coincidence takes this for granted and is a personal or collective construction that acknowledges especially pertinent metaphors to a specific timely agenda. Irony is the language of the pure science phenomenology. Coincidence is constructed of applied science, and therefore it is subject to continuous expansion or temporal mutations, reevaluations. It can become multidimesional, growing exponentially, something I like to call reverberation. Robert Smithson once wrote: "On the edge of this prehistoric machine age were pre- and post-World War II suburban houses. The houses mirrored themselves into colorlessness. Children were throwing rocks at each other near a ditch."
I really like this overall perspective on time and its relation to space. In reference to time and a statement on the progress of technological advances towards a utopian future, Smithson uses the word "obsolete." He says, "The future does not exist, or it it exists, it is the obsolete in reverse," which doesn't seem to make much sense grammatically, but if you can picture time as space and yourself on a time line, and everything to the left is obsolete, then the future as a mirror image of the past is the obsolete in reverse. Coincidence is the mirror image of the obsolete.

So explain how the story of the car accident you witnessed in Florida affected your work.

I'm not sure it really affected my work. The scary part of it was how it seemed my work affected my witnessing the accident. The coincidence of witnessing that accident in real time was what anchored my marine battle paintings into a pertinent metaphor of contemporary life. Destruction of paradise. Today we do it through tourism which, to me, is hard to say if it is good or bad. Art is what makes life more interesting than art.