Photosynthesizer
Open Studio, Stanford CA, 2011
The photosynthesizer is both an instrument and a sound installation. Left on its own, the piece is photo-reactive, changing the volumes and tones that it plays depending on where the sun is in the sky, and the shadows that are being cast across its face. Over the course of the day the piece will get louder as high noon approaches and soften as the sun goes down, eventually becoming silent in the absence of light. In this way it reacts to and follows the sun in the same way a flower might. The sheet metal petals also fold up and down in the presence of light, casting shadows of their own and creating a rhythm to the sounds generated. These petals are also photo-reactive, meaning that they only move when there is enough light around to activate them, and stop when the light drops (or when they are switched off).
The photosynthesizer going on its own as a sound installation:
And then playing it as a musical instrument:
Demo Sale
Vision Earth Festival, White Plaza, Stanford CA, April 20-23 2011
Demo Sale was a collaboration with poet Kendra Peterson for the Vision Earth Arts Festival, funded by a Vision Earth grant. In the installation, salvaged materials from demolished apartments and other housing structures were reorganized into a virtual junkyard within the art space. Kendra and I wrote poems and other structured narratives based on the memories of people who had lived within those spaces, and then physically inscribed those works into the housing materials through drawing, scratching, burning, and painting.
Sick Cartoons
A One Night Stand, Stanford Department of Art & Art History, Stanford, CA, Nov. 16 2010
Sick Cartoons is an installation examining the way that semantic meaning is contained within invisible particulate layers which sit on top of our objects of beauty. The drawings in this installation were washed with with TB (tuberculosis) positive blood from a local hospital, rendering them biohazardous and untouchable. By adding a layer of context (contaminate) to these classical objects of beauty, one can render them repulsive without altering the physical appearance. These objects are sized at the normal size of their transmission (i.e. approximately the size they would appear in art history textbook reproductions). For close ups of the images used, please see Drawings.
Offerings to the Virgin
Stanford White Rabbit Society Presents: Black Mass @ Unisex, Stanford, CA, Nov. 7 2010
A meditation on different types of "offering." Installed within a functioning toilet stall as part of Black Mass @ Unisex, Offerings to the Virgin holds a red cloth altar to Mary, complete with flowers and donation cup. Visitors who choose not to donate coins may feel free to return the gift of Christ's Body into the toilet bowl. Unisex, in the 1970s, was a popular spot for gay Stanford students to "cruise." The walls of the stall are covered in homophobic graffiti, some found in the site by the artist, some added. This graffiti names both the artist and the young gay men who have tragically committed suicide in the months leading up to the installation, questioning the "Christian-ness" of those individuals who claim a religion of love and forgiveness as their own while spewing rhetoric so hateful that it spurs their children to bullying and their neighbors to suicide. The installation suggests the artist's hope that, if there is/are a God/gods, that he/she/they hear all offerings and speech, not just those offered within the confines of church walls. The piece is both an altar to gay martyrs and an indictment of hatred in all forms.
Naron
Stanford White Rabbit Society Presents: Black Mass @ Unisex, Stanford, CA, Nov. 7 2010
In the Book of Revelations, the number of the beast, 666, is in fact represented in the original Hebrew script as nun-resh-nun, or naron. 666 is a misreading of the numerical value of the Hebrew characters, which is in fact 616. Naron is the Hebrew name for the reigning Roman emperor at the time of the book's writing, Nero. This bit of numerology reveals the entire book is not a foretelling of the end of the world but a coded anti-Roman screed ("the seven heads are seven mountains [the seven hills of Rome] on which sits the Whore of Babylon"). This design is part of the altar for the Black Mass midnight vegan sacrifice.
Swarmth
Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin, CA, October 12 2010
Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin, CA, October 12 2010
Swarmth was a public event held at the end of a 10 day residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts as part of "l'esprit de corps," an experimental group residency. See the l'esprit de corps homepage for more info on the residency. The event included a dinner and a series of flocking exercises designed to allow for the development of pattern and flows within the dynamic group structure.
Once upon a time...
Elsewhere Collaborative, Greensboro, NC, June-September 2010
The woods can be reached through a cavernous doorway on the second floor.
The tree inside sprouts from the pages of fairy tales in the Elsewhere collection.
The paintings on the walls are all patterns pulled from clothing in the wardrobe. The materials used in the imaginative game of dress-up are applied to the interior space of the installation as well, wrapping you up in the world of imagination illuminated at night by light from within the tree itself. The hanging objects were selected to both capture and reflect the light from the tree, as well as to fit the fairy tale archetypes that each wall represents: specifically god, monsters, life, death, and cancer.
Monster wall, detail.
God wall, detail.
Life wall, detail.
Cancer wall, detail.
There are beds in the room so that visitors can come in and be read stories from the books of fairy tales within the tree by the light of the tree, and can activate and perform those and newly created stories within the space.
Gift Shop
Elsewhere Collaborative, Greensboro, NC, July 2010
Gift Shop was a mural created for Isaac and Hannah Nichols' Gift Shop installation, in collaboration with Camillo Perdomo. The mural was created by whitewashing over a collage on the wall and then repainting with black ink the images which had been erased, turning them from a mishmash of browning papers into a homogeneous construction more befitting a white walled gallery space. This white walled space was then used to sell all-white hand-made linen reproductions of objects from the Elsewhere museum collection.
