In my installations, sculptures, and interactive works inanimate objects are often used as metaphors for emotions, fears, and longing. By questioning our dependency on, and fascination with, “things” this work examines the deep vein of magical thinking and nostalgia that informs the American experience. Central to this experience is the stubbornly held feeling that the right machine, or combination of machines, has the potential to make life secure, happy, and, most of all, meaningful.

Almost always site-specific and often room size in scale; much of my work only becomes fully activated when a viewer enters a space. The question of what is being seen and experienced is integral to the works conceptual foundation. Is it art or has the viewer simply stumbled into an odd snippet of everyday life? It is the uncertainty of what is actually the piece that takes up a central role in grasping both the intent and meaning. In some cases the works exist independent of a greater context and in others the pieces operates in an experientially narrative structure.

Spinning Corvairs, ejection pods for the wealthy, dangerous living shipping containers, rebellious interactive televisions, breathing HVAC ducts, and humidifiers and dehumidifiers wrestling with one another; like Frankenstein monsters come alive they appear trapped with no place to go. Futile, dysfunctional, yet poignant and often lovely, these mutated creatures combine a childlike joy with allusions to a culture grasping, and gasping, for control.

Trained as an architect, my fascination with the relationship between form and function is ever present. In almost every case the pieces themselves perform work in a way not too distant from their design. This focus on function, as well as potential, is often extended in directions that are simultaneously absurd, fantastic, obsessive, humorous and darkly prophetic. Indeed the work often appears to hover in a twilight zone between the living and the inanimate, holding attributes of both and illuminating in the process our continual and collective quest in seeking meaning in the world.