Artist's statement 2012

As the French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux compared, “architecture is to stonemasonry what poetry is to letters,” my work creates an amalgamation of both architecture and words. Inspired by Ledoux's notions of utopia and architecture parlante, I seek to make "architecture speak" with poetic reinterpretations of everyday forms.

My work builds on the premise of the building as body, an idea expressed historically beginning with Roman architects' systems of symmetries and references that reflect human anatomy: façade (face), atrium (heart), and nave (navel). In keeping with such metaphors of the body, I depict buildings as mutable forms, susceptible to entropy while accruing histories and topographies that parallel human corporeality. By recognizing the need for nuance and sense of place in the urban environment, my work contradicts the idealized spaces of modern architecture and proposes rebuilding from its rubble.

I give words robust, physical form with raw building materials to portray how ideas of grandeur influence space, place, and the social sphere. My drawings and sculptures portray words constructed from steel, brick, concrete, and other mid-century building materials, referencing modern architecture's (and minimalism's) embrace of industrial methods to achieve monumental forms. I counter the impenetrable and austere qualities of such forms by inserting notions of humor, futility, and the human spirit. My work poses questions about production, capitalism and industry in a time when the emphasis on materiality has changed to that of a virtual reality. I create precarious structures, and architectonic bookshelves that merge the ephemeral and intangible nature of language with the built environment. Within this framework I explore environmental concerns and the creation of place as a construct of both mental and physical attributes.