My work is predominantly about creating an opportunity for a common experience. I want to join people through aesthetic experience grounded in humor and enthusiasm for the unpredictable beauties of life.
I have been working for years to develop my voice as aesthetic mediator in this experience. Only recently do I feel confident that my artistic language communicates these ends and am just beginning to share my work with the public.
I use my art to make physical my enjoyment of life and the world, to share the elements which amuse me and to materialize that sensation for others. I bring a sense of celebration of experience to my work, regardless of the ephemeral nature of events and exhibitions-- and draw upon an appreciation for the good, the peculiar, and the absurd in life.
Each piece creates its own environment with a unique structure and experiential system in which the audience is encouraged to partake. Thus, the "rules-of-the-game" are specific for each piece and transgress the established norms and regulations of daily life. This new behavioral code alters people's guards, enabling them to come together in the way that two dogs meeting on the street greet each other with abandon.
My work creates such experience through constructing a place where each person is free to enjoy elements of the work and engage in its entirety. I use humor to lower people's guard and seduce them into a genuine sentient experience. Such an experience removes the viewer from the daily-grind of performing and thinking before feeling. In inverting this unspoken social norm, my work conjures a time in each of our lives when we were free to feel first.
This is felt in one way or another by each participant in the piece, and thereby produces a common bond-- uniting them regardless of the persona each puts on to function in daily life. I call this conceptual situationalism, the idea of abstract experiences, shared, and grounded/founded in the place which incited its expression. In this way, I create a world which unites peoples who may not usually come together. My ultimate goal is elevation through the commonalties of humanity.
Similarly, the idea of editions-- which are an integral part of each of my pieces --- is based on my commitment to sharing. The piece is not just to be enjoyed and experienced by an erudite art-community, but by any interested person. Ownership of my work follows this same commitment. The editions repeat that the work is not exclusive to a specific group, but that art, like life, is for anyone to consume and enjoy.
Yet unlike many conceptual sculptures, my work has powerful formal elements and each piece is filled with references to my architectural background. Hand-in-hand with creating experience is creating objects. As space locates each person in the world-- so does the space of the piece delineates and guides the person to experience.
As the world becomes more fragmented, I rely on vignettes to give people a common experience -- a shared future-memory based not on the manipulation of intangibles and abstractions, but on tangible spaces and objects-- to bring them together and trigger elements of our common humanity.