Artist's statement 2009

In drawings, sculptures and installations I explore ideas about space, architecture, and politics. My work conveys parallels between the body and architecture, where rooms are made anthropomorphic, walls are porous, and furnishings become topographical. I use construction/building materials to convey poetic reveries, contradicting their original function as structural building blocks. I am also interested in addressing multiple degrees of space, which can be defined by a series of interiors and exteriors beginning with the mind, to the body, the room, the building, to the city. My work then conflates these boundaries where multiple levels of space are represented.

My recent installation “Think Tank” represents my thoughts as a library of wooden blocks. It is a precariously built shack from the outside with illusionistic bookshelves within. Here I created hundreds of faux books out of found two-by-four boards that I routed and painted. I then stenciled in graphite titles for each book in various fonts. The hand written titles stream together observations, names, and captions that signify an autobiographic denotation of time, much like a disjointed journal. The outside of the structure was unaltered, left in a crude state, with raw wood and exposed nails. This play between interior and exterior space denotes an analogy between architecture and the body, representing the room as extension of the mind.

My current drawing series responds to commercial signage and corporate logos as a means for expressing personal messages of sentiment and political commentary. I specifically reference ornate, fluorescent Hollywood signs and vintage Los Vegas strip billboards, where the context of advertisement is changed to a platform for poetic prose. The text addresses the here and now, and is intended to stimulate awareness to place, breaking the monotony of corporate sameness, and merging the boundaries between personal and public.

Statement for two-person exhibit Parallel Lines, at Raid Projects, 2007

Third Floor Exit Strategy

Third Floor Exit Strategy portrays a dialectic of inside and outside, while responding to the current crisis in Iraq. It is a large bookshelf built from aged wood that I gathered from local demolition and construction sites. The books are wood blocks with titles stenciled in graphite and numbered to portray an archive. My intention here is to convey a library of thoughts, creating a physical representation of ‘mental storage’. The titles narrate a disparate sequence of observations, memories, dreams, and current events. The nonlinearity of cerebral space is represented, as books are misplaced, lost, or out of order. The titles string together an (internal) monologue, centered on moments of extreme physical challenges, climbing through tunnels, and altered states of reality. I am interested in the space of domestic interiors and how these structures frame memory and perception. Throughout the text I recall personal memories of intimate spaces, as I experienced them through different levels of consciousness, unconsciousness, or somewhere in between these mental states.

An exit strategy is, by definition, a means of escaping from an unfavorable situation. It is a plan for retreat which Superheroes regularly rely on, like the bat cave. In military strategy it is a plan understood to minimize the loss of lives and material and should be activated when the cost of continued involvement out weighs the achievement of the objective.

This installation follows a series of works that I began in 2003 in response to the missing exit strategy preceding the invasion of Iraq. At that time ‘exit-strategy’ was a buzz word the media meddled around, but the idea remained as mysterious then as it is today. In Third Floor Exit Strategy I continue to explore the notion of a dysfunctional, or nonexistent, exit strategy. Within the bookshelf is a secret-passage door swung open, superhero style, however it leads to a smaller exterior door on the other side of the wall which is only large enough to fit one's head through. I am interested in creating architectural structures that defy expectations, as expectations often have little to do with reality.

A Survey of Landmarks Connecting Two Black Holes

An object that plunges down a rotating black hole may re-emerge elsewhere, in another place and another time. Black holes may be apertures to distant galaxies and to remote epochs. They may be shortcuts through space and time.

-Carl Sagan, Exobiologist

There is evidence that some black holes are not stationary, but "wander" through space. This series of drawings pinpoints the position of two black holes in Los Angeles and explores their spatial relationships to other relevant sites.