My research examines the designed and found icons of the American character in search of our underlying values and our aspirations as individuals and as a society. These values are visible as monumental forms, but also camouflaged in mundane ubiquity. Themes within the work- flows of resources, moral and material conundrums, and the legacy of empire- are touchstones that constellate to destabilize and complicate what may have once been seen as foundational American ideals.
I present a comparative study of the mass-cultural investment in disposability and the human desire to imagine permanence through emblems, monuments, and self-celebration. While disparate intentions inform these impulses- one to remember, and the other to quickly forget- each will materially describe our society to future generations. Our physical material footprint will outlive the emblems designed to signify our political and moral ideals to stand as our lasting cultural monument.
Through this lens, I explore the complexities of the American landscape(s). I am drawn to working on a large scale because of the nature of entangled subjects of Land, settler-colonialism, economics. I want my installations to not only be about landscapes and monuments, but to become Hyperobjects, monumental and sublime, to approach an overwhelming scale that reminds us that we as individuals are dwarfed by both the vastness of the universe, and engulfed by the ecosystem of industrial capitalism.
My landscape installations are arranged differently each time, often integrating locally-sourced discarded materials, with the goal of staying receptive to the physical site and the social and political atmosphere of my surroundings to inform each iteration. This queer approach rejects the assumption of permanence and attunes to the unique nature of an exact point in space and time.
My rigorous engagement with materials and techniques positions me in a long lineage of craftspeople and skilled laborers. Knowing how to listen to materials and how to make things by hand connects me to traditions of embodied knowledge that are fundamental to being human, yet uncommon in an era of mass consumption and deskilling.
At the heart of my practice lies a tendency toward a process-driven approach and a determined material engagement across a range of media in textiles and sculpture. I am bred from generations of trash-pickers and metal scrappers and I possess an irrepressible scavenger impulse to transform other people’s waste into art. My art emerges from a vision of interconnection of the human- and the more-than-human world.