STATEMENT

I was born in Philadelphia, and largely grew up along the Susquehanna River in the rural community of Riverside, PA. My yard bled into strawberry fields, forests, and a creek. I climbed apple trees, rode bikes and horses, and ran and played from sunrise to well after sunset every day. For me, this place continually fueled my imagination and operated with a surplus of time. I could lie on my back in the grass and watch the clouds float by like cotton candy, or gaze at the Milky Way that seemed at once so far away and within reach. I could linger in observation, dream, and breath.

I also spent a great deal of time with my Poppy, hiking through the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania's coal region with his Springer Spaniel Jake. We puttered through the hills in his old mint green Cadillac. While Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty rang out on his 8-Track, I talked to trucker’s on his CB radio. From the window I watched streams flow red with ore, coal slag piles one after another so large you could ski down them, and coal refineries mystically light up the night.

During my teenage years I moved to Lancaster, PA, a small city associated with the Amish. Instead, I encountered development and suburbia. Farm fields gave way to the subdivisions and shopping malls of suburban sprawl. This world of hustle and bustle contrasted with my previous existence. I felt that time ran so quickly in this new place that I could never do enough fast enough. I could never quite keep up.

For a long time, the strategies of repetition I used in my work, which had me making hundreds if not thousands of obelisks, boxes, written texts, airplanes, grids, and many other forms, took on a factory-like insistence upon keeping up with the clock of production and filling up space with material forms as evidence.

In many ways my work attempts to make sense of these seemingly disparate spaces of being and doing. I have often used repetition in my work, making hundreds if not thousands of obelisks, boxes, written texts, airplanes, grids, and many other forms. This strategy has taken on a factory-like insistence upon keeping up with the clock of production and filling up space with material forms as evidence.

During the pandemic I started to consider being. Instead of filling up rooms with objects, I became increasingly captivated by the way objects in space could activate states of being. My physical practices—from walking and running to yoga and meditation—form a central component of this research.

A certain level of repetition and accumulation remains in my process-oriented work. I often build up materials only to scrape them away or cover them in more materials, creating a push and pull of presence and apparent absence. I bring whatever noises lie beneath these surfaces—the messy personal and public histories—into equilibrium through a visual language of bare bones. underlies formally reductive surfaces.

I am always fascinated by what hides and what remains.