What’s your story?

I was born in L.A. and spent my childhood mostly in Boston and various areas in Northern California. I was one of those kids who was either on the piano or taking things apart and trying to understand how they worked so I could invent new things.

In high school and college I was athletic and I honestly think at times it sort of pulled me away from my true self— which was really about being creative and exploring. But at the same time, it probably taught me discipline and grit.

My undergraduate schooling was in audio engineering and digital graphics. After working in a prominent recording studio in Hollywood and being surrounded by a lot of audio engineers, I realized that being an audio engineer was too narrow of a path for how I wanted to live my life.

So I changed directions completely and joined the Peace Corps and lived in a small African country called Eswatini for 3 years. I didn’t have running water, reliable electricity, and I stayed in a wonderfully round thatched roof hut. I lived with an incredibly loving Swazi family, who I’m still in contact with today, and our quiet homestead was nestled between sugar cane fields. I worked in a various clinics and ran an athletics and creative program at an orphanage. I made music with some of the high school kids at the orphanage and we actually got their song on the national radio station— the whole orphanage listened in when it went live on the radio, such an exciting day. Those three years taught me a lot about myself and about the human experience. I care deeply about helping underserved populations, so after getting back to the US I decided to work in medicine and currently live in San Francisco.

You’ve described your true self as being centered on creativity and exploration. Can you talk more about how that focus on creative exploration has shaped the variety of projects you’ve pursued?

I’ve always thought of myself as a highly creative person and I have always had a huge variety of interests. Some people like to be as narrow in their interests, which I appreciate, and we need these people in society, but I most appreciate lateral thinkers— someone who creates new bridges between different fields. This is my strength and I’ve worked on inventing, such as making an origami pill counting device developed for resource constrained places, creating a game on the theme of divergent thinking, created endless amount of music music, worked in sound design, published papers in global health, worked with laser cutting, 3-d printing, CAD, machine learning, programming, and industrial design. I love jumping into subjects which I know nothing about and then going extremely deep on them. This is my nature— to generate novel questions, and then solve these questions creatively that have no instructions, no precedent. That’s what excites me the most.

What inspired you to start exploring visual art?

What actually got me interested in making visual art was the photographer Ray Colins. He would capture these incredibly abstract waves that would only ever occur once in nature in its exact form. I remember walking through his gallery and it was just really inspiring. I was like, I think I could do something like this. So I wondered for whatever reason, what if I tried to do something similar to his work, but instead of capturing waves out in the middle of the ocean, I did macro photography of little self made waves? I was really curious what this would look like or if anything worthwhile would come from it. By the way, I had zero experience with macro photography at the time and didn’t have the equipment to actually do this. But that was exciting. Becoming a beginner is such a lovely experience. To see the wold with fresh eyes is such a refreshing way to be creative.

And that’s really where I started— I just wanted to capture pictures of little waves [laughs], and everything just evolved from that.

You’ve worked across a lot of different creative fields and even healthcare. How do you define yourself as an artist?

I don’t like identifying with what I do. I work in medicine, but I’m not my job title; I’m Joey. I spend as much time on art as I do in medicine, but I’m not an artist; I’m Joey. Defining yourself by profession or whatever can box in your potential and fuel an ego. I don’t want either. I am attracted to people who chase internal prestige through seeking perfection in their art/work/life, not people who feel important through external prestige. Rather than call myself an artist—which I think is too narrow, too trite—I’ll share what I love: inventing, creative problem solving, divergent thinking, coming up with thousands of ideas to solve a problem, challenging conventions, exploring curiosities, creating new visual styles, and studying both science and art. My interests aren’t my titles, and neither my curiosities nor my art have boundaries. To me, that’s the only path towards true originality— being as authentic as possible.