Works

Looking At A Cloud
Acrylic on canvas
66.25in x 35.75in

Bridge (with studies)
Acrylic on masonite
9″x12″

Flag (work-in-progress)
Test screenprints (seven-monoprint run) for onsite installations
Translucent, adhesive vinyl sheets; acrylic screenprint ink
32″ x 32″

A multi-color split-fountain screenprint creates a blended spectrum, signaling equitable access to air and light, irregardless of preconceptions of territory, property, and identities. These site-specific art-prints re-work the 3D CT-scan of a patient’s relatively healthy and hale lung vasculature. The artist’s research of the branching fractal patterns of the human respiratory system has led to looking at the everyday individual’s relationship to the larger “branching” networks of a contemporary environment such as Los Angeles. Following these inquiries, the artist therefore intends to mount these images at venues that also have the goal of equitable and healthful cultural growth and exchange.

Atlas
Screenprint (10-print edition)
BFK Rives 280 gsm paper, deckled edges; acrylic screenprint ink
17″ x 13.125″

This imagery is based on a previous mixed-media work using a dated Britannica Atlas edition. I remembering seeing in my youth, as if built-to-order, these atlases in American family bookcases of the late last century. The one on our shelves had a cream, textured cover with gold-embossing, parts of which have been mimicked and show through here. Many of the ecological, societal, and territorial lines found in the maps of those past atlases have been drawn and will continue to be re-drawn to ill and unfair effects. To acknowledge these problems as human-made is an emphasis, fallible and in need to be re-worked, lines drawn by hand as if by eye, and to forge ahead accordingly.

Vital Signs
Screenprint (five-print edition); mixed-media; onsite installations
Adhesive vinyl; plexiglass; aluminum c-channel frame; LED back-lighting
72″ x 48″ x variable height

The mixed-media work Vital Signs was created in context of the critical cultural events of the past several years. From a pandemic illness, persistent social and political inequities, and the exigencies of ecological sustainability, Vital Signs explores these issues through the prism of individual, social, and global health. Like a workup of diagnostic charts, Vital Signs examines these systems of health as symptomatic of a data-reliant pattern of inequity, an order of disorders, so to speak, or at the very least, a precarious pathology. Following from these concerns, Vital Signs deploys the sign systems, infographic imagery, and statistical metrics of the social, natural, and informational sciences readily available in our ubiquitous, if often fractious, media environment.

However, not solely to try and accurately point out where systemic problems lay, but in closely observing these inequitable orders, perhaps we begin to visualize the limits of their constructions, and therefore, the potential and need for these entrenched structures to be re-ordered toward more equitable ideas of health.

View image detail and links.

Weather Program
Audio-video installation/projection
LA Artcore, Union Center for the Arts Courtyard, Los Angeles, CA 90012 @ 11/14/19, 7pm-10pm
Projector; keyboard amplifier
20′ x 10′

This audio-video installation features a lightning strike shot at 1000 frames-per-second on a state-of–the-art Phantom Flex camera. Seconds of fleeting footage unfold in hi-def over the course of four minutes: the duration of a popular song or the re-telling of a fable. Weather Program re-programs in current audio-visual ways the fable “The Three Principal Virtues” from the following ancient Hindu text:

Prajapati had three kinds of offspring: gods, demons and men.

[The] gods said to him: “Please instruct us.”
To them he uttered the syllable “DA” and asked: “Have you understood?”
They replied: “We have. You said to us, ‘Control yourselves’ (‘Damyata’)”…

Then the demons said to him: “Please instruct us.”
To them he uttered the same syllable “DA” and asked: “Have you understood?”
They replied: “We have. You said to us: ‘Be compassionate’ (‘Dayadhvam’)”…

Then the men said to him: “Please instruct us.”
To them he uttered the same syllable “DA” and asked: “Have you understood?”
They replied: “We have. You said to us, ‘Give alms’ (‘Datta’)”…

That very thing is repeated even today by the heavenly voice, in the form of thunder, as “DA”…

-from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Ch. 5

Face of the Map
Sculpture
3-D print; polyactide filament (PLA); acrylic paint
34.25″ x 15″ x variable height

The US Geological Survey (USGS) provides public domain topographical information including aerial photographs, elevation maps, geographical features, hydrography, boundaries, and structures of the United States and other regions. Face of the Map used CAD software to render digital elevation models and maps from the USGS. This was then designed and 3D-printed as the sculpture shown above. The region depicted can be found at the coordinates 33.3286° N, 115.8434° W.

Weather Program #2
Roy Jean Park (video) and Matthew Clough-Hunter (music score)
Audio-visual installation
55″ LCD flat-screen; vertical wall-mount; headphones
4 min, 01 sec

Prajapati had three kinds of offspring: gods, demons and men.

That very thing is repeated even today by the heavenly voice, in the form of thunder, as “DA”…

-from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Ch. 5

Self-Reflection
Mixed-media installation
Ford truck side-mirrors; enamel on glass; seat

It is a bit cliché to say that the modern city has embraced car culture. People spend a copious amount of time in or preoccupied with their cars, such that some might say it has become pathological. Yet, is there more to unpack here? The experience of driving often offers modern people their only moment to sit and quietly reflect (which may be indicative of our culture too). They “decompress,” plan, and question the direction of their lives. In a curious cross-section of views, while looking out of their windows, they look in.