Artist Statement
Employing lights, speakers, MDF flats, stage like constructions, lines formed with colored tape on the floor resembling stage directions and curtains, I’ve created theatrical environments over the past several years that function as   the site of an event, and the event in itself. These environments are often inhabited with objects developed from loose plans and improvisation, combining different approaches to making: controlling the form through force and responding to the nature of the form as a material and as an image. By combing the biomorphic with the geometric, the readymade, the hand-made, the personal, the art historical and the earth bound into gooey, unstable territories I hope to address the multiplicity of conflicting ideas that we embody.
       Upon entering the 2007 installation entitled “If I Were Here”, the viewer is immediately implicated into the work.  Becoming both a performer and viewer, they are led to feel present in a deserted performance space where it is not clear if the action has already taken place, or is yet to occur.  The makeshift stage, looking like a crashed spacecraft or the ruin of some anonymous factory, backs itself into the corner, both threatening and beautiful, waiting for the viewer to make the first move.  The curtains and stage directions on the floor make it clear that the performance begins and ends with the gallery space…but what is being performed?
       Another installation from 2008, entitled “Theseus”, functions as a constellation of charged objects in dialogue with one another.  Three Geological objects with colorful molten surfaces stand as strange abstract figures holding court, activating the floor. Beautiful and toxic, their surfaces, pleasurable and menacing, attractive and repulsive, confuse the distinction between genuine nature and artificiality.  The center piece in the installation, a chandelier, is hung from above and spot lit, casting vague organic shadows onto the gallery walls, filling the space with images both violent and beautiful, a future memory of lost nature. Hung on the wall is another piece made from layers of dust-covered plexi-glass.  Their caked-on filth creates a condensed landscape of both real and imagined time and space, an opaque window into art history.  The surrogate psyche of the installation, draping itself around the lighting rig in the space like a saddle, made from knit wool and industrial rubber hangs unlit and stealth, controlling and protecting the architecture, an ominous unseen enemy. 
       An untitled installation from 2007 (Evil Dead 2) employed similar forms of staging to evoke ritual space filtered through the lens of personal fantasy, Romantic painting, and Minimalist theatricality.  The installations protagonist, an ivy plant, crawls down a steel cable trellis and into the exhibition space, a gentle reminder that even though we make it our duty to control the natural world, it has its own agenda.   The floor moves up onto the wall both flattening and re-enforcing our place in three-dimensional space, confusing the hierarchy of figure and ground, the base and sublime, man and nature.
       More recent projects have moved directly into the landscape and the fantasy space of art history.  In “Rapid River” I set out to create my own body of water following in the example of Monet’s artificially inspirational lily pond.  In “Monet’s Ghost” I went one step further and “cast” a linoleum cutout of a shadow from my studio floor into Monet’s lily pond attempting to reverse and revive an image made static through its own mythology.