Statement
Objects are time stamps; markers of place, class, and culture. What happens when we intervene upon their existence, repurpose their use or mimic their collapse? How does the paint roller feel when it is squeezed by an egg-slicer? Does it feel emasculated? Liberated? When does an object’s life end? Does its life end? These are questions that direct my interactions with the objects that make up my work.
Collect and build, disassemble and preserve, coerce and release – the tension between these actions is central to my practice. One example of how this oscillation has become integral in my process is in the construction of my work, Sale. For months, multiple times each day, I drove by a faded “Home for Sale” sign at the end of my street. This sign became a guide, sending me on my way every morning and welcoming my home at night. On a day no different than any other, I veered into the right-hand turn lane and began to turn up my street when I stopped, kidnapped the sun-washed sign and proceeded to my studio. In a cyclonic moment of cutting, spraying, binding and balancing the piece was complete. By removing the sign from its intended location and stripping it from its predetermined purpose, I interrogate it’s prescribed meaning. In placing the sign atop a squat L-shaped shelf I am extracting it from patterns of domestic use, calling attention to its meaning as an overdetermined symbol of domesticity, and redefining it’s prescribed utility.
While formal strategies of line, gravity, and balance govern the compositions of each work, it is not until I remove the object from its original context that I see the potential in disguising it as a serious formal element in a piece. By extracting a domestic object such as an outlet plug or a pasta strainer and treating it as a relic of design, my work disrupts our normalized perception of the things we rely on, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.