(Brief) Biography
Jeff Horwat is an artist and teacher from eastern Pennsylvania. His art and research practices explore the intersections of wordless narratives, psychoanalytic theory, and arts-based research. He has taught art in both K-12 and higher education for more than 10 years, has published visual scholarship in journals such as Visual Art Research, and is the author of ‘Nothing is a Cure’—a wordless allegory about anxiety and desire. He currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Stephanie and two children Maya and Simone.
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Creative Research Statement
Jeff's current scholarship and creative practice draw from arts-based research methods to visually explore intersections between surrealism, Buddhist philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory. Many of his illustrative artworks take place in an ambiguous psychological realm presented as a checkerboard labyrinth where wind-up toy figurines act out different roles, performing different components of the human psyche, to tell narratives related to some aspect of the human condition. Themes explored in these narratives interrogate and problematize both Buddhist and psychoanalytic theory's constructions of desire, belief, identity, love, creative, purpose, and power. These theoretical explorations are done visually, through the creation of allegory and parable as means to present and share complex theories in suggestive and more accessible ways. 
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