The Short Story
My family moved to the mountains of western Maine in the early 1970's. Both of my parents taught at the boarding school, Gould Academy, that I graduated from in 1981. My mother taught English and my father taught both English and photography. I grew up with the world as a giant playground; running, jumping, digging holes and finding ways to go down hills very fast on skis, skateboards and bicycles.
I went south for college, attending Davidson College in North Carolina, receiving a BA in Studio Art in 1985. Then I went to graduate school at The University of Tennessee, receiving an MFA in painting and sculpture in 1989. At that point my playground was pretty much everything between Maine and Georgia, with LOTS of time on Grayhound buses and frequent field trips out west and the far north towards James Bay. Still with the running, jumping, digging holes, going down hills fast but with the added complications of going up rock faces (small rock faces) and down various white water rivers...still, small white water.
After grad school I started a pattern of bouncing back and forth between teaching art & art history and working in digital imaging and publishing in private industry. When Photoshop and Pagemaker came out, I was there, helping print publishers figure out how to adapt their design practices. When digital video came out, I was there, building interactive CD-ROMs of Shakespeare's plays....only to announce to the office, one day in 1994, that all of our work was dead, because this thing called the World Wide Web just killed the CD-ROM. Within a few years I was working in Higher Education adapting all of their marketing materials to the web.
After 20+-ish years of working on websites, both on the programming side and the content side, I am also back tracking, revisiting what images, especially photographic images have become. On one hand I am still essentially a painter with that unique drive to MAKE. I think in terms of picture space and modernist approaches to building, destroying and reconstituting the illusions and references to 3D space on a 2D plane. I have a knowledge of art history which borders on tedious and often have long debates about whether Caravaggio and Ellsworth Kelly can really be quoted in the same image. I am also profoundly aware of and interested in the ability of those 2D planes to tell stories, convey realities, manipulate narratives, reflect ideas and comment on the world at large. Honestly, I am not as good at that second part as I would like. I am getting better though and through just plain obstinance I am slowly building a body of work that tells stories and, hopefully, eventually will both reflect and embody ( thats a key dichotomy for me) ideas that are, I believe, at the core of much of our relationships with the world, with history, with aspiration, with memory, with failure and success.
During the COVID pandemic, we relocated to far western Massachusetts. Really, a lot like Maine, only smaller. The same vast economic disparities, the same heights of cultural offerings, the same depths of despair caused by opioid addiction and economic hopelessness. I'm the web programmer/photographer and video producer for the largest employer in Berkshire County, the hospital system for the whole county. We see it all, and its amazing and heartbreaking, all at once.
Try that on. If you want a more clinical listing, my resumé is, or will be, attached below.
I can be reached by e-mail: pooley at wickednifty dot com
I am on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pooley/
I have a few other websites which are in the midst of a semi annual rebuild. I will list them here when I get them to a point that I am not embarrassed by them and have not yet begun to hate them...its usually a short window in time, not unlike spring in Maine...though longer and, hopefully, less unpleasant than the mud season portion of spring in Maine.