PUBLIC
Public site-specific art & installation are defining aspects of my practice, for their ability to foster healing, stillness, and growth. Each piece, designed for the public and in public spaces, functions as an ‘anti-monument’, poetically disrupting binary narratives meant to promote one individual over others. Relying on the language of infrasctructure (signage, construction), they subvert the regulatory systems that have been mapped onto human bodies, our relationships, and our understanding of the natural world. Rooted in very personal acts of letting go, each piece carves out a space for others to do the same.
CLOUD TRANSMISSION (….to hold & to let go)
‘Cloud Transmission’ was a large-scale long-form temporary installation measuring 39 feet by 9 feet on one wall of the Mesquite Arts Center in the DFW Metroplex (TX, 2023). Inspired by the outlines of ephemeral natural forms in Ukiyo-e prints, the shapes (measuring 10 inches to over 7 feet) were digitally designed and then cut in iridescent adhesive vinyl. A site-responsive work that took several weeks to design, the completed installation shimmers and shifts with perspective & daylight. Installed while I was going through a period of loss, ‘Cloud Transmission’ contemplates our desire to hold onto that which is fleeting.
For the birds (…who own nothing)
‘For the Birds’ was a large-scale public installation at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, where I was a 2022 Museum Artist-in-Residence (CICA Museum, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea). The installation wrapped around 5 walls of the gallery, mirroring smaller installations as part of Skin Hunger 2, the culminating museum exhibition. Titled after a line in Mary Oliver's poem 'Storage'*, ‘For the Birds’ was Comprised of approximately 14,000 clear 1 cm furniture bumps moving over approximately 35 feet of gallery space. Inspired by migration patterns & made during the period my practice became nomadic, 'For the Birds' explores the weight of what we carry with us when we leave.
*the lines from 'Storage' are:
"...More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own
nothing—the reason they can fly."
Watch the VIDEO here.
I WORRIED
Inspired by the eponymous poem by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, “I Worried” is a series of modified street signs that replace typical regulatory language with lines of Oliver’s poem about anxiety, vulnerability, and evolution. By attaching electrodes to leaves and human skin, I recorded the music made by local plants, as well as by my body and those of other Franconia residents as we meditated on different states of being — worry, love, and connection. This music was combined with nature recordings (wind, birds, water, frogs) to make original compositions. As viewers pass by, a solar-powered sound device vibrated the thin aluminum, and select signs act as speakers ‘singing’ each unique song.
Enacted as a walk in nature to consider our connection to the earth, control, and anxiety in an embodied way, the sound has since been dismantled, but the poetry remains. It is a permanent work of art at Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota.
Watch the VIDEO here.
PARTUM SERIES: cradle + NURSEMAID
Two anti-monuments about interiority and shifting states of being, Cradle (blue) and Umbilical (pink) were a spontaneous gesture of labor and love, the result of stumbling upon a pile of recycled materials that kept the park fertile in its days as a farm (irrigation tubing). Through the vocabulary of male-dominated systems of production and construction, each large-scale tangle explores commonly accepted definition of labor, favoring that which is rhythmic, interior, relation-based, intimate, ambiguous, or shifting. The PARTUM SERIES was temporarily mounted at Franconia Sculpture Park in 2019.
(untitled) billboard
Mounted on a public LED billboard, (Untitled) Billboard used the deconstructed the language of advertising, replacing commercialization with contemplation. Located along M-59 in Utica, MI (Detroit Metro Area), it could be seen by traffic traveling eastbound, and from the Fire & Police Department.