Winding through forty-some-odd states and growing up on the highways and flea markets of America led me from Louisville, Kentucky to Seattle, Washington, which I have called home since 2007. I acquired a deep appreciation for artistic installations, folk and otherwise through my early experiences: peddling objects with my mom at roadside venues; living at hippy compounds, and places like Hubcap city, a highway sideshow boasting the world's largest collection of hubcaps. In Seattle, I have collaborated with various art groups, including Implied Violence, Saint Genet, and New Mystics, the latter of which I continue to work as a founding-member, artist, and curator.
Current experiments and research threads branch into territories explored by The Situationist International group, with a modern twist: from building on the writings of Debord to explore psychogeographies through assemblage works that incorporate collected detritus from pseudo random walks or solo dérive – all the while pondering questions about regular distribution, machine learning on data-exhaust, the nature of being and freewill, to engineering a sort of topological détournement by transforming the semantics of signage through folding, twisting, and cutting its shape to form different homologies — and with it, new meanings.
Past works have utilized discarded signs, carved into coffins – celebrating the previous landmarks which anchored communities to shared memory as a means to comment on place, permanence, and urbanism. Other works have reconstructed bicycle wheels into spinning painted mandalas and prayer wheels, engaging passersby in a form of environmental play.
I'm interested in critique of the process of urban development and its inherent effects of alienation and marginalization, examining the waste we create as we move forward while reframing the experiences we collectively share within the built environment. We are building Towers of Babel on landfills - the garbage below provides the symbols and psychology that support our commodity driven ascension into an anxious dream.
Since arriving in Seattle in 2007, I have collaborated with and built an extensive artist community, all the while developing my individual practice as an installation artist, fabricator and musician. By day, I fabricate signs and city infrastructure using metal, plastic, and wood to create everything from sign letters and architectural forms to utility infrastructure components. My skills and expertise as a builder and technician have led me to support artists like Gary Hill and institutions like Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art.
After returning to school for computer science and mathematics in 2020, my research processes and ambitions in the arts have evolved extensively. I chose to study these topics in order to enhance my art works. Driven initially by a desire to build my own music software, understand video and image manipulations, and live coding languages, I quickly found myself at home with computer science, and completed a rigorous course load of both mathematics and computer science classes for my Bachelor’s of Arts and Sciences dual degree. Though I was not new to using technology to make art, particularly after working on several data science projects and papers on machine learning and data visualization, I realized that I would like to dig deeper, using these new tools as a way to express complex emergent philosophical ideas in my artistic work. My future projects will inevitably use technology as a means to address issues related to our collective transformation into a way of being that involves layers of our existence inhabiting digital exhaust or a lack thereof, reflecting on the omnipresent automated surveillance of our data, while exploring new ways to reveal these unseen hands and simultaneously point to what has been lost through this transformation.
“Never before, when it is life itself that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize over life.” – Antonin Artaud