What is my work about?
The drawings and sculptures I produce democratize the images that saturate our contemporary and historical visual culture, isolating them as autonomous visual fields and governable material things. Without alluding to a private significance or personal narrative, I simply collect and manipulate surfaces and objects in space. My formal and intuitive organizational methods confront and tease out the instinct to read each object as a symbol and each composition as an allegory.
Artist Statement
My work is a form of semiotic assemblage. I choose material—whether for its physical substance or visual symbolism—that is capable of signifying a range of ideas, histories, processes, and possibilities. At its base, my practice is founded on periods of incidental, sometimes promiscuous accumulation: gleaning, gathering, and contemplating images and materials that correspond in shifting ways. From these periods of collection, I produce bodies of work—on paper, or installed in everyday spaces—that make sense of these archives. I think of my compositions as rebus-like insofar as they fall short of being explicit or absolute, as if hesitating to complete a sentence. I also consider them interviews with different semiotic methods, at times rehearsing, and at times revealing the rituals, archetypes, and often loaded expectations and that guide our interpretation of the meaning of different signs and symbols. Though much of my focus is grounded in visual material—popular icons, figurative depictions of everyday objects or, in more recent research, the New York Public Library’s hand-picked archive of “stock photography”—I also think about material and media as data that can be mined, made to service any number of ideas. Similarly, visual images compose ideas, communicating through a kind of coding that comes through composition and, at base, a binary kind of selection: “this stays” or “this goes.”
My series of ten handmade portfolios (all 2012) are a legible and very literal example of an accumulation of drawings and collage using images from books and magazines. Each is presented as a thematic collection, and in whole suggestive of narrative case files, presenting characters, environmental settings, tools, objectives, histories, and prophecies.
“Double Danko; Halsey Grotto Remains” (2012), an installation of sculptural assemblages in a backyard in Brooklyn, was inspired in part by an incidentally inherited collection of backyard junk and a prolonged mediation on the garden through the writings of Robert Smithson.
The abstract sculpture “An Animated Presence” (2012) is similarly emblematic of my practice, which often takes place within my apartment and involves repurposing everyday domestic objects or perhaps dismantling them to draw from their various components. Here, among other pieces, table struts and round marble tabletop are set in conversation with a cloth bolt resembling a roller shade.
“New Shapes; Kill Their Masters” (2013) and “Utilitarian Hexapod of Celestial Pillar” (2013) originated from “Excess of Void,” a collaborative residency with Aaron Anderson at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Using textile dyes to treat raw wood, we gave lumber and plywood a celestial aesthetic similar to that of tie dye. The dyed wood was used after the residency to produce a body of paintings, as well as a series of anticalvary barriers using beams.
The “Organ House” series of works (2014) resulted from a nine-month studio residency at the Silent Barn. In exchange for cleaning and organizing the basement of the Bushwick music and performance space, I was allowed to use it as a studio and exhibition space. Filled with a miscellany of ephemera and construction junk related to the building’s history and current use, the initial condition of the space was hazardous at best. The process of cleaning and organizing, however, defined the material I used and shaped my understanding of that space. The final installation of “Organ House” in the basement space teeters on familiarity. Like a pegboard of tools in a wallpapered room, or a flower arrangement on a table saw, the works playfully oscillate between domestic and utilitarian references that touch on anthropomorphism.
The “Night Draws” series (2012-14) is a series of 36 surrealistic or dreamlike graphite drawings that I made mostly late at night. Many start as grids and line drawings and subsequently grow into sculptural proposals, psychedelic furniture, and mysteriously hybrid graphic designs. Moving from one drawing to another, I either develop or antagonize a previously established idea in order to expand the universe of things and themes that the series addresses. Fibers, metals, gelatins, and organs suggest specific media and properties; objects and tools suspended in space or set in relation to each other refer to the rules of physics; the iconography of glyphs, crests, letters and numbers suggest occult and public significance. Most drawings are created without reference material, so the act of collection or accumulation is drawn from an internal source—a personal recollection of images, figures, symmetries, and styles.
CV
EDUCATION
2006
Minneapolis College of Art and Design; B.F.A. in Graphic Design.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2014
Organ House; Silent Barn; New York, NY.
2012
Building Something: Tearing It Down; Mondocane; New York, NY.
Waves II; Co–Lab; Austin, TX.
Bouquet; Good Press Gallery; Glasgow, UK.
2011
Resist Pop Fantasy : Liquids Words; Soo VAC; Minneapolis, MN.
COLLABORATIVE EXHIBITIONS
2013
Before and After Science Fiction; Wish Meme Art Fair; New York, NY.
2012
Telephone Blue; Synchronicity Space; LA, CA.
2011
Aaron Anderson and Eric Carlson; Gallery M.; Milwaukee, WI.
Radical Cemetery; XY&Z Gallery; Minneapolis, MN.
2010
“Peace Out” ((((OOOOP; Art of This Gallery; Minneapolis, MN.
Acid Wreath and the Post Everything; Synchronicity Space; LA, CA.
2009
Our Starry Universe; Art of This Gallery; Minneapolis, MN.
2008
Millions of Innocent Accidents; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Minneapolis, MN.
Us Doves; Needles & Pens; San Francisco, CA.
GOLDEN ENERGY; Art of This Gallery; Minneapolis, MN.
2006
THEBLACKGAMUT / LAZERBEAK; The Soap Factory; Minneapolis, MN .
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2013
Home Front: After the Museum; Museum of Arts and Design; New York, NY.
Ephemera; Garden Party Arts; New York, NY.
2012
Patterns, Marks, Repetitions, Patterns; Beginnings–; Brooklyn, NY.
Everything is Index: Index is Everything; Recession Arts; Brooklyn, NY.
2011
The Family Show; Good Press Gallery; Glasgow, UK.
Product Porch w/ (RO+LU); Museum of Contemporary Art; San Diego, CA.
Anthology; Isington Mill, Manchester; United Kingdom.
Man as We Know Him, is a Computer; Mastodon Mesa; LA, CA.
2010
Hello Sweden; Gallery KRETS; Malmö, Sweden.
2009
Shinders, curated by Matthew Bakkom; Burnet Gallery; Minneapolis, MN.
2008
Heartland; Van Abbe Museum; Eindhoven, NL.
2007
Forever Ending: Oxxxx Hxxxx; Organ House; Minneapolis, MN.
Endwise; Current Gallery; Baltimore, MD.
RESIDENCIES
2013
Excess of Void; Museum of Arts and Design; New York, NY.
EVENTS & SCREENINGS
2012
Go | Red with Peter Burr; Brooklyn Arts Council; Brooklyn, NY.
2011
Prrrple Rain; Trylon Micro-cinema; Minneapolis, MN.
2010
Wet Dub; 1419 Space; Minneapolis, MN.
2009
Don’t Sleep on It; Walker Arts Center; Minneapolis, MN. Multiples Mall; Walker Arts Center; Minneapolis, MN.
PUBLICATIONS
2014
The Third Rail, Issue 3.
2012
Location Books, Volume Five.
Limner Journal #2, London, UK.
2011
Image Breakers, Museums Press; Glasgow, UK. &&&; Journal of Artist Books, Issue 30. Anthology; Museums Press, Glasgow, UK.
2009
Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory; New Museum / Phaidon Press.
WORK EXPERIENCE
2011 – 2014
Faculty, Minneapolis College of Art and Design.