My artistic career is compelled by the idea that everyday fun, playfulness, and vulnerability can help us investigate our world in new and interesting ways and ultimately forge and strengthen human connection.
Most of my artistic investigations center on public performance art. In 2009, I completed a series of projects In Chicago and LA called “From here to here”, connecting my house and a friend’s house with a long piece of thin string, a gesture that mimics the narratives we construct in our daily lives. The piece makes us wonder how our individual histories overlap in time as well as how urban environments shape our ability to connect. This series culminated a few years later, when i was invited to connect Machine Project Gallery, who represented my artwork at the time, to the LA County Museum of Art as part of a group show at LACMA. The response to this series was overwhelmingly positive: local teenagers followed me, calling out “that string shit is dope,” and another man encountered the piece and decided to wrap up my string behind me and return it as a souvenir of “that amazing day when you did something totally unexpected.” A group of performance artists vowed to paint a stripe across the US in response.
My latest performance pieces have kept the element of play as well as the concepts of everyday beauty and banality, but have turned to the relationship of humans with nature. In a series of installations, i’ve crafted earthwork-inspired landscapes that mix real plants with fake plants and ask the viewer to “find the fakes.” In it, i’m wondering if there’s something essential about natural beauty versus man-made beauty and how that idea affects us and our environment as we live our everyday lives.
In addition to performance art, I also engage in the more private act of painting. In my latest series of abstract acrylic pieces, I focus on the idea of vulnerability in our everyday lives, meditating on what we hold and what we let go and the false duality of vulnerability as a strength/weakness.
In whatever medium I choose, I hope my work continues to communicate a sense of reverence for everyday life and curiosity about the ways in which we are connected or disjoined to each other and our environment.