Artist Statement

I am an artist working in sculpture, drawing, and digital media with a body of work that explores the visual languages of architecture and landscape as a means of interrogating the systems and structures that shape our planet, our society, and our personal, social, and political identities. My work is driven by a sense that we define our existence through the structures we create: architectural and engineered structures as much as through our social, political, and financial systems. My creative research is centered on entities that philosopher Timothy Morton termed hyperobjects.  That is, entities such as climate change and the global financial system that are so massively distributed across space and time, and whose pervasiveness and non-locality (one cannot touch climate change, yet we all can feel it’s effects) challenge our ability to fully conceive of them at all. I explore the paradoxes that these entities suggest through forms that express dualities: structure and collapse, fluid and frozen, apocalyptic and banal, thesis and antithesis.

Within the binary, I create fractional forms that embody multiple states; reconciling opposing forms in a way that both preserves and changes them, or sublates them. The synthesis of interrelated yet contradictory forms often yields an imperfect and ruptured union. Some aspects of each progenitor resist unification, building tension and fracturing under the stress. The ruptures in my work, both physical and logical, are meant to entice questions about complicity, convenience, and consequence. It is my hope that these works operate both visually and logically to invite viewers to think more closely about the spaces we inhabit, the systems we abide by, and the ways in which these define our past, present, and future.

I identify foremost as a sculptor, and my training has lead me to master a range of traditional and emerging techniques. Many of my sculptures are first envisioned on screen; the works are then fabricated using a combination of digital and traditional processes. In the design phase, I balance my decisions regarding methods between practical, efficient, and economical factors against expressive, communicative, and gestural considerations. My goal is to create objects that elicit the manufactured and the hand-made; through the tension between the subjective mark of my ‘hand’ and the precision and seeming objectivity of the ‘manufactured’ I seek to evoke a conversation about the value and meaning of labor and manual skill in an information economy.

I organize my creative work within a research driven, ‘project-based’ methodology in which the subject and conceptual framework of each project guide my material and aesthetic decisions. The media, subject, and forms of my works are the product of contextual research and as such can change from project to project. Two sculptures from different bodies of work may utilize different primary materials and scales of construction, however, a closer study will reveal threads of imagery, formal relationships, and methodologies throughout.