STATEMENT OF WORK

Artist Statement

In my artwork I use fragments of electronics, pieces of a once functional piece of technology. The pieces I most often use come from televisions. I think a lot about technology and how it’s the primary medium for our information, entertainment and often our inspiration. I archive the fragments in glass and acrylic boxes sort of like a reliquary. I also use organic matter, primarily food because it is extremely interesting to me to watch it decompose. I’m fascinated by the metamorphosis that occurs in the changing form of, let’s say an apple - a thing that can nourish us and give us energy can become a rotted core of spores and fungus, a thing that could make us extremely sick, maybe even kill us. Perhaps televisions and computers can do the same to us. They can nourish us or make us sick, I’m not sure, so I take the fragments of two disparate things that exist in the world and combine them. I’m trying to make sense of the world similar to Dr. Frankenstein trying to reanimate dead matter. I’m never quite sure what the monster will do but I am sure that it is oddly ugly and beautiful simultaneously like life. Like a painting by Cezanne having a fixation on these forms of food, it’ s not dissimilar to our fixation with technology. Each cube I create is meant to represent a pixel of information, its contents sick like the mind on too many drugs, or the feeling you get when you can't find your cell phone. The boxes are like pixels of technology touching on a range of themes from the cartoon, to still-life, all addressing the human expression of beauty and ugliness in nature. It’s like the rotting orange, something that if ingested could kill but at the same time be used as an agent to save lives.

I began researching by asking myself what exactly is a box. You don’t necessarily have to contain something to consume it and my work has always been about consumption of a non-physical space. By investigating what happens inside of a sculpture and not just the space it takes up, the size of my sculptures say more than I could physically say. I found the ability to manipulate scale to tell a story, describe a situation and comment on culture in the form of a physical cartoon. By installing sculpture within sculpture, I can play with the empty space of the boxes as a whole, allowing the viewer to fill the space with the mind. With food, rotting or preserved, I can culturally comment on the “ready-made” idea of art and the similar concept of “freshness” when it comes to products. 

When I create a sculpture out of technology, (sometimes being circuits or LED strips, others being  tools used by humans in the form of technology) I like to contrast the idea of personification of an object with something that is essentially lifeless. Though I don't speak about death within decomposition, like the idea of a memento mori, I do think about the expression of touch within a still life and that expression in connection with something that is lifeless allows the food to project a temporality as it rots. With longer and more abstracted boxes serving as partitions, I can manipulate the shape, size and messaging of my works to guide the viewer’s eyes into an emotional response from each body of work.