In Cyborg: The Human Condition, my series of transhumanist superrealistic digital works, I extend my aesthetic and technical exploration into the digital universe of computers and futurism, as I continue to pursue a lifelong interest drawing parallels between man's primordial origins as a species and our evolution as present-day entities in cyberspace.

I utilize the imagery of my immediate personal, architectural and natural environments, freezing moments in time suggesting a larger narrative for the viewer to discover

In this work, I juxtapose and digitally reassemble fragments of my photographic work, transposing images from their original “human” context, to produce composite frames with iconic archetypal Cyborgs that challenge audiences to question the human condition.

As with the whales I painted in my Oceans of Blood series, originally exhibited at the Isaacs Gallery, my cyborgs are anthropomorphic. I‘ve endowed them with human attributes, feeling empathy for them as they are perfected in our own image to co-exist with humanity. Both series examine power, ownership, love and conflict.

My current work as a futurist has evolved from my work as a superrealist artist. In both series, I‘ve used the airbrush to create layer upon layer of glazed paint to produce rich tones of colour. With my whale series, I taught myself airbrush technology to achieve super realism. The mastery of this tool was easily tranferred to computer technology.

I’ve lived with the Inuit in Canada’s High Arctic, experiencing the environment and the whales first hand. This primal experience continues to have a direct influence on my work today in which I express a protectiveness towards the pristine environment. In Frontier, (from my Cyborg series, seen to the right), a young woman defiantly clutches a Canadian flag on the Polar Arctic ice. My thought behind this piece is - as countries engage in international subterfuge, will it become impossible to determine who is a real flesh and blood human warrior, manning the gates of disputed territories - and who is a cyborg – an entity endowed with enough artificial intelligence within its source code to have the capacity to feel, to learn, and to distinguish right from wrong?

Having worked in the digital arena now for fifteen years as an artist and media designer, and a
professor of visual art, digital media and game design, I continue to look inward to the human experience in my series, Cyborg: The Human Condition.

My work may be wired to technology, but I’m still human, not data.