ARTIST STATEMENT

Using the history and physicality of spaces as a springboard, my current work involves interventions that I find or create in the walls, floor and ceiling (often in sterile seeming urban environments). These subtle interventions occasionally house microcosmic activity in the form of synthetic, miniature structures of painted polymer clay along with moss, fungi, plants and other organic materials.

These contained pockets of activity dissolve as the walls and ceiling become proliferating, living membranes via the accompaniment of miniscule, accentuated scars, which reference real or artificial histories of previous installations. These activate what are presumably transitional voids between the “pieces” converting negative space into positive, the wall from ground to figure and creating ambiguity as to which of the marks are intentional, accidental, overlooked or created (correspondingly what is the art and what isn't). In doing so, the work rids itself of a frame and migrates not only into each other's territory but also the outside world.

My attempt is towards a kind of perversion of the “neutral” space of the gallery demarcated for the witnessing of “intellectual or cultural” activity. Several larger interventions question the periphery of the “art viewing” space by mimicking the pre-existing architecture and extending or contracting it physically or via implications (like mirrors). The amplification of pre-existing flaws, their juxtaposition with alien objects like sculptures and paintings and the employment of materials in their different states [as metaphors, as illusion and as reality (their base state)] aid in a dialogue that identifies objects as finding their natural position of rest versus objects that have been displaced into this space with a certain violence – i.e. objects that have a contractual as opposed to intrinsic relationship with the wall.

The viewing asks for basic vision, like infants that haven't yet been conditioned to bracket visual information – they are often too close or too far. This incorporates elastic scale shifts from the molecule to the body to the building to the outside world and back. It questions the conditioned framing of attentive vision and asks for a certain centralization of peripheral vision.

The languages of painting, sculpture and installation help these tiny objects turn magnanimous, amplify and assert themselves into space. The viewer's gain through discovery is proportional to their willingness to participate with the work by straining their sensory preceptors and manipulating their bodies to closely inspect the seemingly empty macro-world of the “White Cube”.