Artist Statement, 2024 — Present

My art making begins in flickers of awareness and attachment to the spaces and material I encounter. I think about the wake my presence leaves behind in constellations of objects and structures, and their gradual return to stillness. I draw material from these encounters into a growing collection that is slowly filling up a room. This room and its contents travel with me, as a psychological site, wherein I develop my understanding of relationships between memory, space, self, and time.

I engage in a practice of looking, arranging, and waiting through which I become attuned to the simple reality of the materials I collect. This process helps me to let the forces in a situation act through me as if I were a medium, and to form new rooms out of the conditions I find in front of me.

I have come to understand both the architecture of a room and its contents as a single composition, within which one and several works exist simultaneously. As material builds up, sedimenting layers of association give rise to sculptural and site specific works. The ephemerality of my materials - paper, packaging, discarded furniture, building material - reference the transitory contact between self and constructed world. I work with degrees of fixity and disorder to question the solidity of both art and non art objects to entertain the possibility of transformation and awakening.

Practice

As I work today, I have noticed the edges of work and raw material to be increasingly ambiguous in what is present. The seeking edge of my practice feels most tangible in the arising conditions between untethered substance and tenuously attached material. I sense a kind of oscillation there which pulls one toward the other. The visibly incidental stirs a question about that which seems determined - and the inverse seems true to me too. I can observe new artists books and sculptures appearing out of these conditions. I can imagine an installation of these materials which I would continue to work on throughout the duration of its being shown.

I think often about an unrealized work which is sited in an old, abandoned house, somewhere in the countryside. The house would be both the material used to make sculptures and the location in which they are made. The sculptures would engage the architecture of the house, and bring that architecture to locations of display through their form and spirit. Slowly, the house would become smaller and smaller, until a final site-specific work would reveal itself from the remains.

William Kinne Prize

I wrote a winning proposal for a form of unconventional architecture practice entitled A Building Depository: New Temporal Accumulation of Subject Matter, Material and Memory upon completing my M.Arch and M.S. at Columbia University GSAPP in May 2018. In some ways, I consider my current practice to be a step toward the enacting of this proposal. (Read it here).

Allowing Many Forms

In 2022 I began working with other artists to create unique books using my collection of paper, book making tools, and binding expertise. Initially, these books were all piece uniques that were made in very close dialog with the ongoing questions and practice of each individual I collaborated with. Lately, I've ventured into the world of commercial printing to realize a number of books showing specific bodies of work produced together with artists, or from their practices. The project has become a venue for me to collaborate with other artists or organizations and see how the ways of working I am developing in my art making might engage with other structures and modes. (allowingmanyforms.org).

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Last updated May 13, 2025