Project Statements
My practice is informed by the history of exclusion and in American suburbia and housing inequity globally. My interrelated series Dislocation and Deconstructed Paradise each consist of numerous precarious landscape surfaces elevated on wooden supports and adorned with laser-cut ladders. Shaped by on-site research in Levittown, NY, these works examine the phenomenon of master-planned housing. I connect the visuals of sprawl with the iconography of the ladder and reference its use in art history, from the Byzantine Ladder of Divine Ascent to Martin Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T. Washington, as a metaphor for the history of exclusion in suburban spaces across the U.S. As a result, this work juxtaposes landscape and urbanity, natural and artificial, and the handmade and the digital.
I am increasingly interested in the term technofeaudalism, coined by Janis Varoufakis, which examines how the 2008 U.S. housing crisis led to a dramatic jump in residential inequality and the advent of digital fiefdoms, resulting in the “complete collapse of private space.” My series Searching for Someplace Better examines this dynamic. Using laser cutting, 3D scanning, and 3D printing, I produce semi-autobiographical “technofeudalist dwellings” that deviate from the accepted norms of suburban design to suggest that adaptations to our homes are essential for our future. By integrating digital fabrication, experimental processes, and capitalist critique, my practice questions how our built environments contribute to socio-economic divides.
As a research-based sculptor, my work examines the complex relationship between place and identity in an age of translocality, hypermobility, and widespread displacement. As a U.S. Fulbright Research Fellow in Sculpture, in partnership with the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia I examined Slovak panel homes, colossal concrete apartments that stand as an echo of a former state power. This work draws from site visits, interviews, lectures, and Czech and Slovak pop culture to produce the series Dwelling Upon the Velvet Divorce, an ongoing intermedia project. Working at the intersection of sculpture and community practice internationally requires careful code-switching across cultural and political systems.
I visualize the expansion of residential space as a tension between stability and precariousness. Trespassing and Threshold consist of floating landmasses connected by ladders that visualize borders such as property lines and fencing as rigid economic barriers. To suggest a sense of class exclusion, perched atop some of these structures are house forms depicted in isolation. The exaggerated ladders are arranged to suggest an indeterminate sense of direction–depending upon the perspective of the viewer, the ladder could be seen as moving either downward from above or up the ladder from below. In this way, the use of the ladder speaks to economic and class struggles as a widely-lived phenomena in addition to being tied to specific locations.
As a sculptor, I am particularly interested in how acts of material arrangement can communicate order and stability on the one hand, or an anxious, desperate experience on the other. For example, my series Far and Away and Land Grab explore how community is formed in challenging conditions. Amidst the backdrop of contemporary issues such as the European migration crisis, this series examines this movement as an ongoing, historical phenomenon. Small, simple house forms cling to barren, unfriendly territory in dense clusters, arranged in discordant groupings on the verge of isolation. Geological surfaces reference this struggle as something not only of this moment, but foundational to history as a whole.