2018-2022
Polynation II / Aquebogue Meadow, 2022
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Living on the North Fork surrounded by farm fields,
I am reminded of the importance and the plight of pollinators. This piece explores that idea through a hyper-sensory film experience. I would like the viewer to sense the beauty in a visceral way, and to feel the immense responsibility that we hold in our hands. Actions count. Its time to turn your yard into a meadow! |
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Struggling with the virtual world over the past year, I've battled it by constructing 3 dimensional objects and places to be experienced.
I have always been interested in architecture and how space can color or create atmosphere. At the beautiful Zuccaire gallery this oversize installation is called Breathing Room. I want the fluid tent like shape to float effortlessly in the 24 ft tall gallery, while commanding the space at the same time. I hope the viewer feels empowered, not dwarfed by this enormous room. I am thinking of the overwhelm of the pandemic and our fear, and want the Breathing Room to be about fearlessness and the future. In summing up a year of sadness, isolation and holding our breath, let's now reimagine the after-time. What shall we keep? With this sculpture I am searching for a way to finally experience abstracted joy. Building castles in the air. Immersing ourselves in a sanctuary of color to exhale the past and inhale the future. You are welcome - walk in, dream and breathe. |
Soul Bath, 2021
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The Soul Bath installation was sited in a giant commuter parking lot. At the time , it was a Covid testing site, and across the street from where the vaccines were given. All in giant tents, which you drive through in your car bubble, eerily safe. I also chose this spot because parking lots are the most depressing places. Necessary but really just the worst that humanity can do as far as invention. Their functionality that allows them to exist.
The idea of function is a preoccupation of mine as an artist. I’m always questioning if art can be useful and exploring at what point an object becomes useless. So my intervention here is a drive thru tent. Can this tent, which I’ve rendered useless, inspire a new purpose? Can it remind us about how to overcome and what wonders await? It is an exercise in the aesthetics of hope as it stands here glowing in the sun like a beacon, quite out of place in this giant parking lot. Can I make people feel lighter, feel joy, through an immersion in color, light and shadow? Change is around the corner so maybe we need a space to dream about it. |
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During this long Covid winter, I was considering ideas of “materiality” in relation to physical objects and our attachments to them. I was thinking about reciprocity and the cycle of all things going and coming back around. How much do we need? and for how long? Trying to make sense of all the little pieces, I wove this rolling sculpture with political roots from recycled wood veneer. I’ve made the inside reflective, so you can see yourself when you look in. Changeable signs say “comfort”, “ideas” or “love notes”.
What shall we exchange here? The wheels make the basket mobile, so it won’t stay in one place long . |
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“bARTr”
This installation and interactive show opened in the midst of the pandemic at the Alloway Gallery in the fall of 2020. A collection of one hundred handmade, unique ceramic vessels or bowls of various shapes and sizes is placed in a gallery and “bartered “ or traded with the audience. Exploring the process of exchange, ideas of value, alternate economies, individual creativity, aesthetics and above all social contracts. The viewers select a bowl and perform a corresponding trade by leaving a note, poem, story, drawing or object of their choice.Then they hang their barter on the wall and take their vessel home. Ink drawings of the vessels are hung around the walls of the gallery as an archive or memory. Explanatory texts on the walls guide the viewer through the exchange process. Transactions empty the gallery of all the exhibited ceramic works as the show progresses leaving only the barter notes with individuals’ names and vessel drawings. The images and writings created by the audience become part of an archive and a virtual continuation of this collaboration. |
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Meeting is the last installation that completed at the very start of the pandemic. At the time I was exploring ideas of living in the moment and thinking of unity and togetherness. I wanted to serve tea to those gathered around my table. I gave away ceramic bowls and embroidered napkins. I made vessels with multiple spouts and openings, bowls to contain quantities.
I was thinking of the politics of the "us versus me", which seems so prescient in our time of social contracts. Reflecting on the images , I see the empty loneliness and separation. Even the colours in the piece are uncharacteristically faded and muted as if foreshadowing our coming moments of stillness. |
Meeting details
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My camera obscura is an experiment in experiential art making. It is a personal viewer reminiscent of trust games. It requires a partnership in navigating without eyes. It is a Camera of Curiosity, a strange and unfamiliar object that eventually allows one to see what is behind you. The always surprising images are only viewed by the participant and only recorded by memory. They appear gradually and slowly come into focus like mysterious apparitions of another world. One that is now upside down and backwards yet still strangely familiar.
By capturing the living moment, with all parts in focus at the same time, the mystery of the camera’s image continues to intrigue us with its elusive reality, in a world transformed, floating between fact and fiction. |
Camera Of Curiosity
Drawings and plans for Camera
Global Umbrella Closeups and sketches
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Distancing blanket sketches and prototypes
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Polynation opening
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Welcome to Polynation, a maximal sensory relaxation and living locale. The pieces installed here seek to extend the growing season and form a hybrid meld of plastic compounds, commodified product wrap, soft surround seating and home grown live greenery to encourage stress-free sociability and hint at an alternately imagined future. This installation promotes an interplay of space, stretches time for the viewer and encourages aesthetic and attitudinal enlightenment. A cross pollinating micro utopia is in full bloom. Enjoy.
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Polynation Tapestries and details
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Exploring the possibilities of building a more inclusive, utopian future through art actions, I made this hammock sculpture out of mylar emergency blankets and old oars.The fragile, golden material is designed to be used in extreme and desperate situations. Here it is contrasted with the leisurely form of a hammock, alluding to the strikingly different perceptions of value in our not yet pluralistic society.
I am interested in creating something that did not exist before, where the meaning does not obviously emerge , but must be constructed differently by each person. I’d like the audience to sense the familiar and the foreign, the shelter and its precariousness. Where are we going? Is there enough gold for everyone? The absurdity is that its only plastic. All is illusion.” |
Port D'or Installation at The Money Show.
Port D'or details and Money Show Installation
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What is the form of home?
I am interested in our complex perceptions of everyday forms. The old hammock hanging in my yard is rarely used and came from a yard sale, yet its form says "relaxation" or maybe even "privilege". Some hammocks imply alternate ideas, suggesting impermanence and travel. I travelled and camped a lot in my childhood. Because of this dual connotation both as a symbol of leisure and of survival, I wanted to play with the form by making a biographical hammock flag. It become a safe space like a portable home, one that includes my own memories, toys, and even cutlery. Using saved scrap fabric, ornaments, found objects and bric-a-brac, I quilted an abstract, personal flag. I fly it between two trees like a sanctuary. |
Hammock Painting details
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A documentation of the Governor's Island Portal Kaleidoscope installation which took place over 5 weekends in September, 2019.
The images show the public interacting with my giant Kaleidoscope situated on a porch of the Colonels row officers homes, which are now used as art exhibition spaces. Chosen from over 1000 photos taken over the course of the installation, this non repeating "wallpaper" records the individual stories and experiences of the people that come to enjoy the Governor's Island park each summer. Though originally designed to contemplate the surrounding landscape, this kaleidescopic viewer became much more about individuals looking at each other. And in turn, about me looking at them. |
Kaleidoscope Installation Photo Documentation.
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Driving to my studio everyday through miles of forest, thinking about nature and the magical qualities of trees.
I am fascinated with the mysticism and spirituality of a forest, and instead of always taking, I wanted to honor and bring awareness to the trees by giving something. Large ceramic jewels hang from the branches like natural talismans to empower and protect the trees(mostly from us). The pendants are kinetic and spin or turn depending on their placement or the direction of the wind. The organic shapes and colors of the giant beads suggest a history, like an unnamed religion . All of a sudden the forest becomes the setting of a mysterious performance where humans are only the observers and the trees are the silent masters. |
Voices of Trees Installation
Voices of Trees Beads(details)
This installation is an enveloping montage of photographs of the forest recorded over the course of a year looking out the same window. The trees viewed through the window flow into the forest images encircling the room like a calendar or a diary.
The center the space is filled with “moss” seating from which to view the trees in all the seasons.
There is an accompanying sound track of bird and forest sounds.
Is it possible to synthesize the totality of nature?
The center the space is filled with “moss” seating from which to view the trees in all the seasons.
There is an accompanying sound track of bird and forest sounds.
Is it possible to synthesize the totality of nature?
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Forest Bath (detail) Moss rock seating
Forest Bath (detail) "September to May "
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Conceived in November of 2018 in response to the women running for Congress in the midterm election, Rosy Future was an election action and an exploration of the power of womanhood.
Intrigued by the intersection of textiles and politics, I crocheted the dress form of “Rosy Future” as a signpost and monument to the women who are finally (and again) gaining political and personal power in our society. The sculpture is made from weather resistant materials like the 60% violet shade cloth used in greenhouses to increase growth and blooms in flowers and vegetables. “Rosy Future” can be installed indoors with actual grass sod around the base, to function as a forceful, symbolic monument. It is larger than life and hopefully inspires the audience to enact positive change for the future. There is an interactive component with a “How to“ video link. It documents the process of making “Rosy Future” and is a clear roadmap for those who would like to build their own. |
Rosy Future Alloway Gallery Installation 2019
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Newspapers, once vital symbols of stability, and conveyors of information or ‘truth’ are quickly disappearing, or morphing into the virtual space that we now all exist in.
I wanted to make a piece that was about physical weight and time, in order to push back against all the instant, simulated moments that inundate our lives with newly assigned value. While the original idea was very much politically motivated by the “fake news” headlines, the material itself has a wider meaning for me as a symbol diminishing relevancy, advancing technology, money and the passage of time. “The Seat Of Power” is a sculpture made from compressed newspaper that I collected, unfolded, stacked, sandwiched between boards, measured traced, drilled, cut into shapes, then skewered, pressed and bolted together into an object in the shape of a chair and an ottoman. “The Seat of Power” is made of paper and will certainly disintegrate before long as it is after all a “fake chair”… what of all the compressed truths inside it? |
Reading room installation and Seat of Power (detail)
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In this “Altered Perception“ series of works I'm discovering how light transforms our perspectives of the physical universe. Can we believe what we see? How do we know what we actually see?
The recent 'proof' of the existence of black holes fascinates me and I want to explore the idea that through observation and our collective imagination, truth and fiction can meld into one. The Colossal Kaleidoscope is room-sized sculpture that engages the viewer with changing, brilliant patterns of a fragmented reality. Unlike traditional kaleidoscopes and depending on its surroundings, this sculpture reflects the room and the viewer in it. Relative to its position, the patterns created are as unique as the person looking through it. I want to allow for a space that is both invented and real, where the viewer can create their own dazzling cosmos. |
Kaleidoscope (details)
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‘The Memory Pool’ is initially very personal installation about memory and gradually transformed into a ‘container’ space for audience participation. Dancers, students, teachers and friends were invited to experience the room which included a video of day and night water reflections and accompanying sound track .The audience was invited to sit on floating furniture or in the ‘water’. Some of the participants reactions were recorded and included in a book documenting the entire installation.
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 Memory Pool Floor (detail)
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Memory Pool Installation (detail) and book