I hold a degree in Conceptual and Information Arts from San Francisco State (CIA for short. There's probably a dossier on me somewhere...) "Conceptual" or "Postmodern" art caused quite a stir when first presented in fine art schools - was it really art or just kind of a joke? But I began my studies after this issue was long resolved; a little bit of both.
I used to consider myself conceptual artist, but I now consider myself a hacker artist. A hacker is someone enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming and circumventing limitations of systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. I feel this is a fairly accurate description my creative process. I've developed this way of working because I often find that I don't have the time, money or space to do the work that I really dream of doing. Sometimes I call my work "Postmodernism on a budget." When I started doing this kind of stuff, I had a job at a copy shop, so photo-copies were readily available. I started blowing up my photos in black and white on paper because I couldn't afford to make huge photo enlargements. I had a work I called 'Name Brands: a Photocopy of a Cotton Swab' which was a Xerox of a Q-Tip blown up 11" x 17". I had an unlimited edition which I was giving away for free, and then a limited edition of 10 that I had signed and numbered and was selling for $100 each. This evolved into a larger series of works of over-sized photo-copies on canvas embellished with acrylic paint that I call the "Wallpaper Series." It started as a tongue and cheek reference to Thomas Lawson's essay 'Last Exit: Painting' about how the only "real" art is paint on canvas. I was doing really weird stuff like that, but the "Wallpaper Series" eventually lost all that postmodern hoo-ha and became pretty pieces of art you could hang above your couch. They're still fairly conceptual, but you don't necessarily need to know that to appreciate them. I first knew I wanted to be an artist at the age of 10. I have a newspaper clipping from 1985 to prove it. Flash forward to now, I have been a teacher, an art director, the president of a non-profit arts organization and a curator as well as an artist.The slideshow presentation I gave in China and Hong Kong in pdf form and on Google Docs
Torrey.co - commercial and fine art portfolio
2re.net - the official source of truth on me online
ArtPal - buy prints of my photography to put on your wall.