What is my work about?
I work primarily in sculptural abstraction, and I am interested in how the aesthetics of purpose and function relate to experience. I see abstraction as a method to understand empirical thinking and exercise this through an interaction with form. I am not wedded to a specific material, but I draw from varying disciplines such as industrial and computer engineering, as well as particular aspects of architecture, commerce, and communication.
Artist Statement
During his lifetime, Designer Rolf Faste challenged the field of engineering to embrace questions proposed in art and design. Contrasting the greek understanding of aesthetic, pertaining to sense perception, with anesthetic, the numbing and diminishing of the senses, he insinuated that the field of engineering had traversed into a clinical sphere where quality is nonexistent.
The discipline of engineering is the material foundation of the modern world. While there is no doubt a progressive movement that looks to soften its relationship to life, it nevertheless retains an uncompromising fierceness. I don’t believe we would be better off without modernity, but there will always be a tension between how we construct our environment and our place within it.
The interior of a Costco serves as a commercial example of the push and pull between an engineered platform and the people that occupy it. Each building is economically constructed to simply provide the basics of shelter and temperature control to house a large inventory of quantity. The Dough Piles came about during my time working in the bakery where the dough is dropped onto tables to be cut up for various baked goods. I was interested in the charged state of each pile the bakery itself is a mix of inorganic materials such as hard plastics and stainless steel, which frame the pile as an organic mass of energy. The dough in this case has a relationship to the human body as the firmness of the environment impresses itself onto soft form. A gallery space, in essence, operates in a similar fashion given its propensity to sterility and hard geometry.
I see the works titled Hand Gestures existing in the same capacity. Much like the dough is contained by its environment, the frames are a petri dish for mold growing on agar. Each is inoculated with cultures taken from door knobs. I wanted to create an abstract depiction that related to the hand but did not rely on it for gestural mark making. In Loops I explore gesture in a more literal sense by recording the artist/dancer Gabrielle D’Angelo using natural hand gestures to explain a choreographed dance. I was interested in the confusion between a direct act of communication and the performance’s expressive nature.
In two recent works, I am beginning my focus on the aesthetics of heat transfer; specifically the method to create the greatest amount of surface area within an economical space. In Radiators the form is derived from the organization of computer circuitry, and G10/FR4 uses two fiberglass resin sheets that are standard use in printed circuit boards. The element of compacted planes carry a compelling psychological dimension as dispersed heat becomes the raw excess of data construction. In a more general sense, these processes take place within the increasingly invisible infrastructure of the digital network. I am interested in how a world that is crafted on a visually hidden and conceptually opaque structure will continue to have cultural implications that form our experience.
CV
Education
2009 MFA Yale University, New Haven, CT
2004 BA University of St. Francis, Joliet, IL
Exhibitions
2014
NYC NADA Art Fair, And Now, Dallas, TX (solo)
2013
Arsenio, Shoot the Lobster, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
Video Days, SMU Pollock Gallery, Dallas, TX
Omar Khayyam, Eli Ping Gallery, New York, NY
XXX, Cyclostyle, Bangalore, India
2012
Group Show, West Street Gallery, New York, NY
Young Artists Sale, Primetime, Brooklyn, NY
2011
NADA Art Fair Miami, West Street Gallery, New York, NY
Exhibition with Michael Yaniro, Fountain, Brooklyn, NY
In Between the Sheets, Harlem Studios, Harlem, NY
Colored Cactus, Industry City, Brooklyn, NY
2009
Group Show, Cave, Detroit, MI
Careerists and Visionaries, Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York City, NY
2008
Pizza Corpse/Spot Book Release, Printed Matter, New York City, NY
2007
Symptoms of Expenditure, Moser Art Gallery, Joliet, IL
2006
Distances, Contemporary Art Workshop, Chicago, IL
Projected Announcements, Contemporary Art Workshop, Chicago, IL
Curated Exhibitions
2014 CPA Prison Arts Exhibition (Assoc Curator), Silpe Gallery, Hartford, CT
2011 WORM, Cooper’s Feminine Apparel, New Haven, CT