James Halvorson was raised on the High Plains of the Western Dakotas, he received his BFA in Painting from the University of South Dakota in 1998. He alternates between studio and social practice projects, sourcing through studies in history, economics, ecology, and philosophy. James enjoys bringing a research based approach to these disciplines. in 1997 Halvorson co-founded the independent student art show that runs concurrently with the Wilbur Stillwell Juried Student Exhibition, the following year he received the Art Department's Senior Scholarship. After earning a masters of accountancy he pooled resources with young creative leaders to incorporate zootown Arts Community Center in Missoula, MT. His studio practice is located in Montavilla, Portland, OR.
These mixed media collages on found paper and encyclopedia pages can be viewed as a technology intended to involve us and then go beyond. They meld abstraction, text, and figures to demonstrate philosophies as personifications of the human condition where various cultural heritages are interwoven, and real objects are represented in unfamiliar settings. These objects serve to make new arrangements by chance and necessity. They create narratives by loosening meaning.
I am interested in how an image can have numerous connotations and the way identities transfer. My work is intended to get at the idea of how our collective agreement on truth is formed and how that is reconciled on individual terms. The themes take a historical view on the development of academia, and the history of our media. I want the instantaneous sensibilities of contemporary experience embedded in primitive object technology. Our web of knowledge, being the certainties formed by our personal histories, is received by these works. I source through studies in history, economics, emerging media, ecology, philosophy and enjoy integrating these disciplines through a researched based approach to art.
I find flashes of inspiration while reading and moving about my places in the world. My mediums are a combination of original photography, drawings inspired by scholarship, and painted images. My process allows subjects to converge, to bring about moment specific meaning, to generate stories that remain open ended for the beholder to complete. I locate narrative by integrating elements from one piece to the next.