STATEMENT OF WORK

My work considers the space where infrastructure meets hope through sculpture, drawing, and text. By delving into specific sites and cultural artifacts, including the Las Vegas Strip and props from magic tricks, I poke at the crossroads of human wishes and built systems of multiple scales and eras.

In many cases, my work complicates the legacies of famous men. For instance, the Braidini was a plastic 90's as-seen-on-tv device for braiding hair, named after the late magician Harry Houdini. After stumbling upon it while attending a Zoom seance to the magician, I cast multiples of the form in pewter to create a long, linking column. Ironically, Harry Houdini was a public critic of the spiritualists who hosted seances for profit, leading a yearslong campaign to discredit those who promised to reunite loved ones with the dead. This anecdote, research, and material transformation culminated in “Daisy Chain (After Houdini)."

In “So No One May Enter (After Howard Hughes”, a sculpture of a sculpture (of sorts), is made in the image of the rotating Silver Slipper sign on the Vegas Strip. Billionaire Howard Hughes was convinced that the sign held a small camera, as its toe paused to face his neighboring penthouse at the end of each spin. This paranoia, plus a hostility towards the glow of its lights, drove him to buy the casino just to seal the interior space of the shoe shut.

In brief, my work circles around a strange and kind of tragic collective wish to see or experience the impossible, and how this wish intersects with capital (i.e., contacting a realm beyond, witnessing a magic trick, gambling away one’s savings, buying a device that solves a problem, aesthetic or otherwise.) The truth of a story or encounter gives way to the fictive potential of a moment, voids becoming spaces of projection.