Finally, I am getting organized. All my beat boxes, samplers, and small electronic gear can now have a home!
Self Series with Gary Hill
Gary needed some replacement shells for his Self Series back in 2018 so he asked me to make them. This one was our first work together after meeting at his CoCA show. Since then we have worked on many more of his works together. It has been fun being part of his process and developing my own practice in reflection. This was machined mostly from flat stock and tube stock of white acrylic. The individual components are hand glued together.
NM Buttons: clothing hardware project
These little puppies were machined using a 1/32” circuit board engraving bit. I ended up breaking quite a few but the end result turned out really well. They just need some black paint or ink rubbed into the recesses.
Crystallizations (neon experiments)
Created an installation at Island Air 2019 with help of Yale Wolf using his neon garden and some of my laser-etched mirror labyrinths.
Giant Crystals
I made this with the intention of projection mapping onto them. The material is a pvc flat stock called sintra. These green sheets were salvage and free. Originally they appeared in Distillations, Crystallizations & Essential Forms, a New Mystics show.
Triangulated United States of America
Over the years of building signs, I have worked on some interesting pieces. This one was a commercial project for a clothing store. The design attempted to build a topography somewhat true to life. The material is architectural plywood. Triangles were cnc cut.
Work in progress: mechanical harness to hold violin for a robot player
I never finished this because school got a bit hectic. My concept was to mount the violin on a rotisserie and the bow on a linear motion system rather than try to rotate the linear motion system.
Touch Sensitive keyboard with esp32
The esp32 micro-controller has built in capacity sensing inputs. I made this project super quick for my advanced electronics in music course. The esp32 ran a serial connection to MAX where custom code interpreted each one as an individual note. Around the same time I experimented with a high-end IMU sending UDP packets to MAX. The body was machined from a 2X4 and the plates were machined from circuit board material. I am looking forward to graduating and having more time to experiment with wacky instrument designs. Only a couple more months to go…
New Mystics Art Da$h 4 Cash, City Arts Fest, Seattle 2012
Not sure what I was thinking when I welded this odd structure together out of rebar! I keep looking at it and wondering… But alas it was ten years ago in 2012…
Island Wilderness piece with Wun Ting Chan
When I was curator for Island Wilderness, I collaborated with each of the artists. In this work, Wun Ting Chan and I built this awesome mid century looking billboard. I meticulously machined all the pieces and engineered the construction using a mixture of plastic, wood, and aluminum composite materials. She did the design and painting based on my curatorial prompt for the show. Her cad drawings were very precise. What a fun project!
Signs, signs, and more signs...
I am a sign maker and over the years, I have had the opportunity to make a lot of interesting signs. Here is an example of a large project. It began as a sample made from high density urethane (HDU), but the machining process was both time consuming and messy. So we got creative with some cad drawings, and flattened them out into panels, cut each one and tack welded them together, and filled the seams with metal epoxy. The end result was very beautiful (as far as signs go). There are three pics, one with the titanium letters dry fit, one with the panels freshly painted, and one with the two samples side by side.
Neon Racoon with Yale Wolf and Baso Fibonacci
When I was acting as curator for the Island Wilderness show, I collaborated on one piece with each of the artists. For this piece I wanted to do a neon racoon. My contribution was cnc machining the aluminum and acrylic panels, welding the substructure, and assembly. Yale bent the tube, and Baso painted the racoon in his idiosyncratic style.
Snail Light for Adara
Just had to make an etched mirror snail light box for someone. I have a series of etched mirror sculptures planned and this was an opportunity to test different etching techniques out on an antique mirror. The box is made of machined acrylic with a bezel milled into it and a cutaway. The mirror drops in and inside there are some scrap LED strips. You can see my studio in the background…
The Engender Project with Gary Hill
I was in Paris with Gary installing this complex maze of one-thousand plastic parts. As a sign maker, the design engineering was pretty straight forward — stacks of one inch machined PVC flat stock, but the complexity of keeping everything in order, and making installation templates, having it all arrive in the crate safely… another story. It ended up working out beautifully in the end.
Masando's sheath
Whipped up a wooden sheath for a homie in need. It was machined in two pieces, glued together and sanded into shape. His oddball sword didn’t come with one I guess…
Faux Gucci belt buckle
When you want something that doesn’t exist and that you couldn’t afford… lol
Language Pit with Gary Hill
Working for Gary Hill over the last couple years, I have been asked to create a number of installation pieces. This one required a seamless black acrylic box and some threaded tubes, and an aluminum bottom complete with hole patterns for the electronics layout. This one ended up at In Situ gallery in Paris.
Ting's robot enclosure
This collapsible pen for a robot was made using repurposed sign board and simple butterfly style cleats for joinery to peg the pieces together. The plastic corex material slides into slots. It goes together in a few minutes.
bed frame (why not?)
Made this bed frame for my current live/work studio. It has tons of storage underneath, and the panels lift up in the middle so I can access things deep under the bed, up against the wall.
van life... (what artist lifestyle is complete without this?)
This is the kitchen I built for my 1992 eurovan. Initially the eurovan came with agm rims on it and looked pretty gangster…