Forged with a strong background in drawing and painting, I currently work in a variety of media, including drawing, installation, painting, and photography. My work explores the impermanence of the man-made, shaped by the persistence of nature. At the same time, I play with the reverse process: the commodification of nature. I seek to isolate layers of light, decay, and transformation found in both synthetic and natural forms. In the process, I horde, collect, group, organize and section.
Whether I’m working on a painting or installation, each piece is an investigation or excavation letting the space lead its development. In my studio or at the site of an abandoned building, I am curious about the previous inhabitants. I am interested in examining and recreating how the environment was used before—even if my rebuilding of that history is imagined or imprecise. The framework and visual language of the urban and social fabric are continually being torn down and re-erected. Histories are rewritten. I may find old paint chips or ripped out walls and imagine a past different from the actual one, but my work represents the exploration of how these materials relate and retell this information. Emphasizing small irregularities and mistakes, the installations are a public display of the intimate and elusive process that happens inside an artist’s studio.
My installations take forms that interact with the architecture of the space: leaning, rebuilding, partitioning. The surfaces play off one another to create private and public spaces simultaneously. Subtly manipulated construction and found materials become my sculptures. The arrangements of the sheet-rock, wood, and Styrofoam insulation can make it seem like a work in progress—an ongoing interruption of space.
My understanding of color and light comes from painting. What does light do to a space as it moves, as it casts shadows across a wall, as it heightens small differences in color? My work explores the transformative properties of light, be it sunlight or projected electric light. Drawing and painting are a starting point, a means of exploration, and are essential to my decision-making process. By limiting my pallet to the installation materials themselves, I accentuate subtle color shifts.
Some of my most recent work includes elements from personal experiences: how we use and dispose of what we own. By cataloging and organizing scavenged possessions (or desired possessions) the installations, paintings, and drawings become self-portraits, portraits of my spaces.
In my installation, You’d Be Home By Now, I cut small brick-like pieces out of found Sheetrock and stacked them between the trunks of trees. These inorganic pieces then became part of the landscape and will return to their natural elements. In Kitchen, a site-specific installation completed on Governors Island in unused military housing, I covered the cabinets and appliances of the kitchen with blue Styrofoam insulation and painted it to look like walls. I then broke through the “walls” to expose the areas where I had hidden my personal items. Nested away, there were clothes in the freezer, wilted plants under the sink, a hoarding of pens, and pine-cones collected from the island in a drawer revealing my role as hoarder and collector. In the Craigslist Series the drawings and paintings are derived from images in Craigslist.org postings. I find that man-made items which imitate nature hold more monetary value than natural ones.
Through drawing, painting, installation, photography, and sculpture, I investigate our relationship to our spaces and what we own—how we use, dispose, and interpret them.
