Polystyrene Foam, augmented by some found materials, hardwoods, and occasional aqua resin & Marker drawing. 

These sculptures were a knee-jerk response to the contextual shifts in the art world demanding that artists produce inherently biographical work in response to the multifaceted collective narrative of an increasingly comminucative world, towards the completion of the age of information (in my opinion).  The translation I read into that is that Artists are being labelled and requested to be presented, reproduced, and possibly collectible based on their birthright of contextual typecasted and easily culturally consumed roles.

 While that is more than half true, I also believe it is fully wrong.  In every respect. Am I more Alaskan, Caucasian, A Natureboy embodiment than any other artist in my city/region/nation...category? 

I am trying to investigate what the source is that connects us all as one.  So why am I being asked to make a case for how my context is more amplified against the visions of others of similar or comparable backgrounds? As if this categorization would help someone to experience the beauty I have seen, the concepts I am consumed by, and the ideals I am reaching for in my work.  Furthermore, why are those categorical signifiers hyper-stratified as a substrate to "appreciate" or "understand" an art, or any art, when those are the practices of advertising and marketing deviations on the visual realm?  In art history, those layers are discussed in relation to how we understand the human civilization to have grown, expanded, temporarily and specialized or focused while mostly maintaining relationships that helped us fit together. 

So.  For your Marketing purposes and collections checklists, the procedurally toxic polystyrene, which is used for general construction and insulation in many of our homes, looks a lot like glaciers when you cut into it and light it with LEDS.  And I am from Alaska.  So that sorta fits.  I've walked on glaciers that have receded miles since my childhood. That truly is shocking for an environment as cold and dark as Anchorage, Alaska's.  So if our body is our temple and vice-versa, then the enviroment is our ego reflection, our unforgiving ethics instructor, and the indication that we are a small part of an ecology to which we have learned to listen only to ourselves, and sometimes only as a singular "Island unto our[self]".

While I was thinking about the many problems with our environment, the space where my vision and sensations were waking up began to articulate itself in the work as the management of our human consciousness.  The iceberg and other physical conundrums that I was compelled to compose began to unravel this in my mind.  

As a less than fully formed concept, no gallery I spoke with at the time cared about these deeper topics, and because I wasn't willing to label it solely as a green project, this writing exists, these photos exist, and the sculptures do not.  I think that is the discourse they instigate.  Physicists also battle for and against a notion of time in which the present exists and nothing else.  Our placement in this model-dependent reality is a melee of conceptually entangled causations embedded in the local present.  A branching of interlocking tesseracts whose limbs bear fruit in the form of roots that repeat the cycle in a self-contained spime.  An unquestionable yet familiar mystical maze where only trimmed hedges are seen gardens designed to conceal their commonplace wild growths, except when our attention spans and their wavelengths vibe.  If so, this temporarily spotlit abstraction until we can relax again in the wonderful hedges that blind our perception but calm our minds to the emotional and ethical complexity of decision-making concerning what humanity can do to transform our situation to augment our trajectory in the unending present.

Trust me, I kept it light and trimmed the hedges thrice.  Not a bad way to spend 3-4% of a life expectancy.

2015-2019