Artist Statement
1. HIMALAYAS

In August of 2008, I did a three-week solo trek in the Indian Himalayas near the Tibet and Nepal borders. The idea was to retrace the steps of Frank Smythe, a
British botanist who discovered the ‘enchanted’ ‘untouched’ Bhyundar glacial valley full of the wildflowers of his deepest fantasies. He stumbled upon the landscape while descending from a research expedition of Mt. Kamet for the
partition of nations. He renamed it the Valley of Flowers and spent sixth months there researching the botany and wrote a book about his experience with the natives and the sublime. It is now a rarely visited World Heritage Site barely conserved and so remote and without infrastructure that to visit it is to destroy it. I returned to my studio with thousands of photographs and several video tapes of glaciers, waterfalls, and wildflowers. My work process involved editing or
rearranging, recontextualizing the images and base materials of the landscape. This led the project into dialogue about the inherent conflict of reconciling the experience and the imaging of it. Just being there, even just conceptualizing being there was about domination and worse it was the touristic leisurely kind of
territorializing another culture. This research, and the works that I made from it, led to a broader study of the cultivation of the natural world within a global capitalist marketplace.


2. GLOBAL COMMODITY CHAIN THEORY

The contemporary floral industry is a network of complex systems of labor, production, distribution, enterprises, states, and households all racing against the clock. The Mother’s Day roses were cultivated in enormous fields by underpaid
laborers in Columbia, cargoed to Amsterdam to be auctioned and overnighted to local wholesale markets and then distributed to retailers and eventually arranged, packaged and bought by us for our moms. Entangled in systems of provision and theory of consumption these perishable commodities (flowers) are materially produced then the cultural significance is determined within a separate chain of activities (the housing, energy, transport, fashion, ect.). These chains express the distinct combinations of socioeconomic forces (class, competition, state power, ideology) that determine the output, demand, and meaning of the consumption bundle (flower arrangements) in our age of affluence. On the ground, public relations, using the tools of psychoanalysis to mine the unconscious, create desire for these products with rapid expiration dates that an entire global economy is hustling to liquidate. This divorce from nature, this cultivation of the natural world for consumption by culture is the intellectual focus of my work.


3. ARRANGEMENTS

Within my sculptural practice, I am interested in the role the devices of framing play. The institution, the pedestal, and the relationship of objects are the defining forces of meaning. The sculptural gesture of arrangement, as differentiated from installation, is what my newest studio work is exploring. Objects come together for a temporary amount of time for an exhibition, an in studio test, or a performative presentation. They have second lives as participants in other venues of display paired with different and/or additional objects. Each assembly functions, as a floral arrangement or a theatrical presentation does, within a specific limited time period. The objects as individual items also exist with an unlimited set of presentation context possibilities. Meaning fluctuates from the framing of my studio, an exhibition space, a public space, a landfill, a storage facility, a printed reproduction, or a domestic interior. For example, in my arrangement “Illiquid,” I placed five works in relationship to the architecture and each other. For an upcoming exhibition, I will use some of the same pieces in a different arrangement in the context of another exhibition space with a couple new works added. The lives of the works then become progressive, as they normally do within the market system, only this progression is an integral production tool that constantly redefines the work of art. In theory, the progressive life of a work will be documented, which in my thinking, is another mark on the work entangled in its internal and external system of provisions.


4. IN DEVELOPMENT

I am currently working on an essay film project that started with my footage from the Valley of Flowers. Within the next five years, I will travel to nine more
locations: industrial rose farms in Kenya, industrial carnation farms in Columbia, tulip manufacturers in Holland, the international flower auction house in Amsterdam, the festival of flowers in Thailand, the corporate headquarters of Teleflora in California, and to the garden and studio of an Ikebana master in Japan. Not a documentary, I am interested in setting up something closer to Brecht’s Epic Theater. So the objective is more one of demonstration, a non-illusionistic style of presentation where stories are broken into modular or central moments and the word and the image are contrasted instead of a linear uniformity of elements. I want to tell this story in a discontinuous, contradictory, and dialectical way. Which is how the whole system of the floral industry specifically and the commodification of nature in general seems to function. Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege, Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Fellini’s Roma, and Godard’s Masculine-Feminine are precursors.