Adam Gooder – Artist Statement, 2006 I am an artist who uses photography and digital video. I like to create projects with multiple parts—a series of photos that become a tactile, interactive experience, or a series of video projections and sculptures that form an installation. These projects evolve as I dig deeper. My subjects become my collaborators. I am particularly drawn to emotion, in gestures, faces and hands. I’m excited when the play of light or a camera movement colludes with these emotions. In a series of black and white photos, “Ten Percent in One Eye,” photographic modes of “seeing” help me to explore blindness. Blindness, in many ways, also informs my photography. My collaborator, Witold Potempa, is a man with ten percent of his vision, who uses one half-inch thick lens and touch to navigate the world. I use a macro lens, like his lens, and seek out strong sources of light, as he does to get his bearings. I prefer to lay the fiber prints out on a table, so that the viewer can touch them, hold them up closely to their eye, examine details with a magnifying glass, and navigate them on their own. I want the viewer to experience the work as a blind person experiences the everyday world. In a recent digital video project, my son Zane’s Asperger’s Syndrome, (a form of autism), and my feelings about fatherhood are an entry point into issues of intimacy, privacy, medical diagnosis and empathy. In this project, I use loops of home video—Zane as a toddler digging over and over in the sand. The projector teeters atop a stack of books about the disorder. The image forms on a tiny screen floating in the room; the result is ethereal and tenuous. In other parts of this installation, tiny monitors are hung at a distance, and are hard to see. Video is difficult to decipher. I am very interested in exploiting the limits of the lens and technology as a way of exploring the limits of empathy and communication. A simple social interchange is actually quite daunting for a child with Asperger’s. My artwork is informed by an ongoing interest in documentary film and video. I embrace the uncertainties intrinsic to our relationships with other people. I am also an active photographer and digital filmmaker. I like to play out my interests in the medium in all of my work, including work for clients, when I can sneak it in. I value my productive relationships with other artists, as curator or coauthor, and with my students.