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Statement 

Improvised Territory (2008)

There are a number of vectors that my work explores: Issues of abstraction and form, space shaping and architecture, engineered realities and the built environment. I find myself looking for ways to explore these interests in hopefully surprising ways that operate on a number of thoughts simultaneously. My most recent work has been a series of graphite drawings depicting imagined DIY architecture that mash-up different living conditions and life style solutions, and they are as much a search for novel forms as they are a search to understand what may lead a person to design their most personal space according to some internal plan.

The inspiration for these new drawings has a number of sources - all personal to me. Growing up as a kid in the seventies I spent a lot of time around adults who were exploring unique ways to live. Friends of our family lived in an old barn that they had converted into a home and pottery studio; my neighbor built his backyard into a sculptural wonderland made from recycled material and constructed a 100-yard, three story barn behind the abandoned Pack and Save off route 38; my elementary school class helped to construct a geodesic dome as part of Earth Day events; and my own family history is filled with builders. My grandfather was part of a wave of Jewish immigrants that settled in the Jersey Pine Barrens in the 1880s and started farming communities. He built the synagogue and a number of the other buildings in the town and surrounding farms that still stand today. Another influence on this work was my trip to Rome last year and the short time I spent teaching in Wisconsin this past fall. In Rome, I was awe struck by the Coliseum and the Forum-the mass, space and form of the buildings, how they were all hand built, and how over the centuries they have morphed into architectural palimpsests. In Wisconsin, my daily commute was a rural highway, and along the way I saw bric-a-brac buildings of all kinds that read like formal sculptures. This made me wonder what purpose some of them served and what thinking and external conditions lead their creators to make the decisions that lead to these intriguing constructions.

For these specific drawings I made a few rules for myself: All the images must have some sort of obvious internal logic, even if that logic is indecipherable; all parts of the drawing must be made to look like something from the real world; all the imagined construction must be made by materials and processes that I have experience with myself; time as well as form and space must be compressed. I also chose to work exclusively in graphite in order to make these images something that everyone can relate to, since at some point in our lives everyone has drawn something with a pencil. By imposing these restrictions on my process I hope to have achieved images that seem honest and everyday even as they rely exclusively on fiction and the imagination of the viewer.

Works on mylar (2007)

My projects originate from a mixture of inspirations: Science fiction, architecture, nano and biotechnology, surrealist landscapes, industrial installations, quack theories of reality and sundry other contraptions and quasi-science-like things. What intrigues me about all of these things is the gray area between a vision informed by objectively collected facts and a world of fantasy that arises when we attempt to piece the facts together. Most compelling to me is the relationship we have with the tools we use to model images of the unseen: When the model itself becomes what we expect to see and the tools we’ve developed to aid our vision begin to drive the way in which we imagine.

The process for my projects begins with automatic writing; a tool of analysis that relies upon subjectivity and the absurdities of free association, and I like to focus this method on words that are simultaneously personal and publicly shared-maybe the name of a city or a favorite food. My method is to write down every conceivable association I have with these words, and to follow the web of relationships between the different associations. The writing becomes a generator of secret images, providing me with the raw materials to build my projects: the shapes, colors, and decisions of form that become embedded within the work. The projects themselves include drawings and audio works. The drawings are digitally modeled and painstakingly hand drawn on multiple layers of Mylar, becoming an analog of the digital process. The audio projects use the same list of associations to guide the choices of sounds, which I then do my best to make using only my voice. I view this use of my voice as something akin to the act of drawing in a sonic sense: Both involve a unique signature and both can be used to mimic, model, or even invent reality.

By choosing automatic writing as the ground for my work, my intention is to depict a world of collapsing subjects and objects, compressing the spaces of public, private, and invisible codes; highlighting the often colliding and congealing absurdities that drive the forms of our seemingly conscious constructions.