Artist Statement
My interest is in objects and materials which have a distinct functional purpose within a bigger encompassing experience. Zooming in on these objects, I subvert their prior functionality. Removing them from their original environments, I rethink their serviceable presence, inserting them into a new order, often creating environments and installations which function as autonomous, autarchic, self-contained and self-supporting systems. Drawing from my own experience of playing in a band, performing in small crowded venues and bar tending, I often go back to these urban night life spaces to investigate the structures and tools that support them as emotionally charged spaces. 

In my older works ‘Curtain Cube’ and ‘Twilight (Drum Case)’, I investigated a shift in functionalities, In ‘Twilight (Drum Case)’ incasing a whole drum set into an instrument case, extended the case to such a size that it rendered it unusable, transforming it into a giant stage, substituting a backstage functionality with a performative, front-stage one. For ‘Curtain Cube’, the red velvet stage curtain lays on top thousands of feet of lead stringed weights, the kind found in creases at the bottom of curtains, condensing the veil of a stage into a heavy cube.
In ‘Encore’ the gaffers tape is used, a “backstage” material associated with the labor part of a stage performance. The gaffers stabilizing action cocoons the stage and turned the tape into the show itself.
In ‘Untitled (Speaker Wall)’ (2010) I formed an autarchic system using home bookshelf speakers which are stacked on top of each other, forming a small wall. The wall’s back side turned into an instrument - it becomes a speaker that amplifies its own self - and therefore constantly feed-backing its own paradoxical existence.

I am interested in the relationship between body, space and object, that music and night-life environments impose and their connection to similar relationship within minimalism. I am interested in the marriage of abundance with a tight order, exploring structures that embody a liminal state, characterized by the tension between the visible dimension of excess and the material’s powerfully internal order.
In ‘Sweat’, an elaborate maze of bed sheets is inserted into full liquor bottles, the sheets connect one bottle to its pair by moving horizontally in the inner space of the shelves.
As time passes, the liquor in the bottles is absorbed by the sheets and wood, The installation’s “guts” are revealed through the swelling of the shelves, the absorbing action of the wood, the opening of the seams, the movement of the alcohol.
‘Sweat’ penetrates the rigid Minimal form with the smell of fermented yeast, of alcohol,  the loosening of materiality, the soft nature of the sheets, the bubbling and warping of the wood, the specificity of the Molotov image, of the liquor bottles, holding an investigation of a some what sexual nature between control and release.

Exploring the relationship between performers through the sculptural object, I utilize the electric guitar in ‘Doublesilverburst’ and ‘Untitled (Double Face)’. In ‘Doublesilverburst’ I fused a left handed and a right handed guitar together at the head (headstock) to create a single instrument. The two-person guitar negates the possibility of a “front man,” instead creating a scenario in which the creation of music is necessarily a collaborative effort, and disallows many of the characteristic wild gestures and poses of the rock star on stage.
In ‘Untitled (Double Face)’ the two guitars are joint to form one instrument that has no back. The act of multiplying serves almost as a handicap, one that imposes new movement and sound. It now takes two people to activate this musical instrument. When played, the sculpture imposes a hyper intimate relationship on the musicians, facing each other, holding the guitar between them. Every movement is felt, heard, their backs to the crowd.