Someone once described me as a global community oriented object maker. This may seem like a contradiction since art objects usually remain rhetorical, however, it is an example of one of the constant dilemmas I face as an artist. I am an artist who works on many levels. I push myself in and out of the world of making objects, paintings, and drawings and think about the artist as a source of power in confronting the problems and needs of our world.
My work aims to question systems already in place in our society. From the gallery, to public space, communities, and educational institutions, I work to stem perplexing thought about existing ways of being in the fields of reuse, interaction, value, exchange, design and politics.
My work with creative reuse is challenging existing systems of thought about waste and recycling, trying to get ideas of reuse back into mainstream society. By collecting waste materials, I re-purpose things to function in a new way, giving them a second or third life. I have turned plastic bags into mattresses, pallets into perfected versions of themselves, hoses and pvc pipes into hanging ladders, empty spaces into useable lofts or functional areas, bike innertubes, placemats, rubber boots, and car mats into journals, sketchbooks, and wallets, shipping pallets, various industrial tubes, and astro-turf into mini-golf courses, and also create games to promote an awareness of this concept.
I also question by bringing work into the gallery that heavily depends on manual interactions from the viewer, manual meaning one must physically work to get a response from my art. This challenges the gallery to be a venue for education, play and interaction. Manual interaction is leading me to become increasingly aware of our tactile senses. With technology advancing so quickly and becoming smarter and smarter, I feel that the importance of tactile intelligence is being lost. I want to embrace the world where you must know how to turn the knob on the faucet for water to come out, where you must spin a handle for a paper towel to dispense or must learn how to flush the toilet by hand. We can learn a lot by the simple hands-on interaction with an object or mechanism, from simple motor-skills to building and math skills. While it is inevitable that technology is an extremely important factor in economic and social global development, I believe that it is entirely possible for technology to advance while embracing the simplicity of our tactile senses.
Another system that I have chosen to question is that of value and exchange through consumption. I do this through dispensing and trading. For example, my Trust Dispenser instructed people to trade an object of value determined by them for a piece of candy. If they traded an object that symbolized trust, if the did not, that symbolized mistrust. This piece was more for me questioning what trust means to an individual than what objects were traded in the dispenser. My Apple Dispenser is questioning our needs. Why do we need an apple dispenser when you can eat an apple out of a fruit baskest or even sometimes off the tree? The reality is, we don’t. By making the dispenser I addressed what our true needs are. My Creativity Dispenser was in a gallery where it was selling markers and pads of paper. Although I was unhappy with the outcome of this piece, the goal was to question the gallery system and its relationship to the maker, viewer, and seller. Much of what I do in the gallery, whether it’s with junk, interaction, or color is questioning what the gallery values most: artwork for capital consumption.
Through all of this I think a lot about design but not design in the traditional sense. Design in the sense of political, economic, and waste systems in our society as well as products. I think about the function design has in changing our world and how my work can take part in that. I design from the bottom up, starting with the hands on and then developing the design from there which is the opposite way of working from most designers. By using the general concept of waste I have collaborated to design a student run no-waste school café, and developing a program to facilitate community built playgrounds and social areas out reused materials.
So, as I remain an artist working on many levels, I am a firm believer that as artists, we have a certain amount of agency in the world and I am working to empower artists with knowledge of all kinds, create solutions to current problems and remain a source for positive sustainable change in our world. Each concept I address is very political to me and I stand by the statement I once heard, “I don’t make political art, I make art politically”, which remains very true to my practice.