I'm currently in residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governor's Island through October. In April I'll have work in a group show at TSA in Greenville. In May I'll join Flux Factory for an artist exchange in Armenia and in September I'll be in Copenhagen to play games at Live Art for Born.
Pickles & Concrete
Pickles & Concrete is an ongoing experimental time-negotiating kitchen laboratory that contrasts two human attempts to alter the flow of time. In the kitchen we freeze, dehydrate and pickle foods to remove them from their usual cycle of decay. In contrast, we freeze and thaw concrete to simulate the passage of entire seasons in a single day. Pickles & Concrete invites players to get tangled up in the time scales between food preservation, building materials, bacteria and geology
Satellites & Salamanders
Can living in a satellite help us understand our relationships with Earth? Satellites & Salamanders turns a pair of satellites that measure the Earth’s melting ice into a house, climbing wall and a vertical farm.
Print Screen
Print Screen is an exhibition featuring over 450 of the weirdest, most esoteric, or most out-of-context screenshots submitted by 162 participating artists. The show includes screenshots collected from the depths of contributors’ hard drives and devices, which were often taken for reasons now unknown.
Dirty Signs
Even though dirt is where our food comes from, is where our bodies get buried when we die, and is literally everywhere we go, it is not represented yet in the emoji universe. Dirty Signs was an exhibition of international artist responses to the idea of emojifying dirt.
Watershold
Historic gundalows moved materials down the Shenandoah River before becoming materials themselves. Watershold turns the forms used to cast Dirtball’s concrete key into a gundalow.
Autolysis
Autolysis was a poetic and visceral exploration of issues around climate change, plant species adaptation/extinction, and personal mortality through a focus on/engagement with soil/dirt.
Dirtball 3
Dirtball is a love letter to dirt in the form of a reimagined basketball court that frames the soil making process. Dirtball’s experimental concrete is designed to be destroyed and in the process release minerals and amendments into the surrounding soil. The garden and swift tower invite more than humans to play.
Faceplant
FACE PLANT is an experiment in inviting a shared human/soil holobiome. FACE PLANT makes space for the biome that populates and constitutes the 'boundary' of my body and the biome that populates a specific hole in the ground near Ellicott Creek.
Dirtbath
Dirt Bath is inspired by the kinds of baths that birds take in dirt, and by an impulse that letting people immerse themselves sensorially in the smells and textures of topsoil, within the sterile context of a contemporary art museum, might be grounding during post-Covid-lockdown days, and have therapeutic qualities related to the contemplation of personal mortality.
Dirtball 2
Play Dirtball! You can find NYC’s Dirtball court tucked beneath a London Plane tree in the Urban Farm on Governors Island. Dirtball invites you to join birds, bugs, plants, minerals and weather in the soil making game always going on beneath our feet.
Dirtball: Fruiting Body
Dirtball: Fruiting Body is a structural prototype of a soil monitoring buoy in the form of a giant overturned mushroom where the sky scratching mycelium host miniature components of a Dirtball court and a flag for the future DIY Dirtball.
Martin Dance
Martin Dance is a purple martin hotel with a two-person head mounted labyrinth. Players collaboratively navigate the labyrinth by moving their bodies and trace the migration of a purple martin from the Amazonian rainforest to Erie, PA, USA. An accompanying soundtrack is composed from the song of migrating purple martins.
ASSEMBALL
ASSEMBALL offers players a physical way to explore human organizational structures by precariously binding them together. Jerseys and connectors turn teams into representation of various organizations.
Dirtball 1
Dirtball is an invitation to a game that is always going on beneath our feet. The court invites you to join this soil making game along with birds, bugs, plants, minerals and weather.
With Greg Stewart as Kosmologym Franconia Sculpture Park • Shafer, MN, US • 2019
PLASTIC DANCE
With marble mazes and head mounted labyrinths Plastic Dance explores the path of plastic from the streets of Philadelphia through streams and sewers to the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers and then the North Atlantic Gyre.
TASTY SCORE
Tasty Score is a human powered drum machine that converts recipes into interactive percussion scores. Commissioned for the Art Prospect Festival in Saint Petersburg, Russia the first Tasty Score converted recipes from the Soviet state cookbook: “Book for Tasty and Healthy Food”.
With Anne Hollaender and Erik Tonning-Jensen as Kosmologym Art Prospect Festival • Saint Petersburg, Russia • 2018THE LONG DASH
The Long Dash, a collaborative climate resiliency race, was originally created for the Philadelphia Science Festival. The Long Dash explores Philadelphia’s relationship to climate change and sea level rise through a cumulative choreographic challenge: part twister, part egg-race, part algorithmic choreography.
KOSMOLOGYM
Kosmologym converted Den Frie into an experimental ethics gym. Kosmologym prototyped five games that challenged visitors to consider, compete or cooperate with others (human/animal, vegetable, mineral, institution). see Kosmologym.DK for more info.
With FUKK & Camp Little HopeDen Frie • Copenhagen, DK • 2018
Rise
With Rise, Camp Little Hope repurposed a historic stairway at Glen Foerd to imagine the potential impact of sea level rise on different neighborhoods and landmarks in Philadelphia. Using mirrored text and the heights of the existing stairs, Rise connects global phenomena with the history of Glen Foerd and the future of the city of Philadelphia.
Glen Foerd • Philadelphia, PA, US • 2017
Hospitality Machines v 1.2
Digital interfaces and built infrastructure often optimize a frictionless experience that makes the medium itself invisible and reduces consideration of the framework and our actions in it. While technology evolves quickly, driven by the free market, the artificial externalization of environmental costs, and planned obsolescence there is no market force to develop means of ethically interacting with these new technologies and the institutions they create. At Practice Space in Portland I revisited and expanded on the Hospitality Machine, a straightforward approach to how art might interrogate our relationship with others. A human to human meditation, a human to plant meditation and a small library invited visitors to consider an other.
Practice Space • Portland, OR, US • 2017
Kitchens & Capitalism: Saint Petersburg
During a two month residency in Saint Petersburg I researched the recent history of the Russian kitchen particularly in the kommunalka or communal apartment. I also began fascinated with The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food (Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище). First published in 1939, this Soviet cookbook saw dramatic changes in 1951, 1965, 1976 and 1999 offering an interesting official portrait of changing relationships to land food and the kitchen. You can learn more about my research here.
MED LOV SKAL MAN LAND BYGGE
MED LOV, a walking tour and conversation, juxtaposed the 1891 formation of Copenhagen’s FriHavn (free harbor) as an economic tool to compete with Germany’s Kiel Canal and the current expansion and gentrification of Nordhavn which is helping fund the construction of new Metro lines. Med Lov was commissioned by FUKK for Kulturhavn's Anchorpoints.
Performed with Maria TeilgardKulturhavn Festival • Copenhagen, DK • 2017
Recipes for Utopias
Meals provide a point of friction where global systems intersect with local bodies. Every detail, from how we harvest, grow, care for, and eventually collect the ingredients, to the way we prepare, serve, and attend to a dish as we eat it expresses our beliefs about the world and our relationship to it. What’s for dinner tells us as much, if not more, about a utopia than any other detail. As part of Utopia School Recipes for Utopias explored the everyday practicalities of radical realities through a performative dinner that prepared dishes from 13 utopias.
Dirtmaker and the Handmade Landscape
Camp Little Hope spent six weeks working in and around Cullowhee, North Carolina on a sculptural intervention for the Western Carolina University campus trail system. Handmade Landscape (May 19 - August 26 2016) is an arts and research exhibition exploring the geography, botany and the impact of recent human land use on Gribble Gap. The research presented in the exhibit informed the creation of Dirtmaker, an environmental sculpture installed in the forest. As Dirtmaker disappears, it replenishes the depleted minerals in the forest’s soil.
with Camp Little HopeWestern Carolina University • Cullowhee, NC, US • 2017
Chamber of Commons
Camp Little Hope was commissioned to create a public artwork for Elsewhere’s South Elm Projects. Much of the available historical material came from reports published by the Chamber of Commerce that focused on the neighborhood through the lenses of business interests and classic economic development. We created alternative publications focused on the many resources that escape notice when viewed through a traditional economic perspective. Community, not as a collection of infrastructure and services, but as relationships and interdependence. Economy, not measured in total revenues but in the impact of meaningful work and fair compensation. Development, not in dollars invested but in connections created and problems solved. Culture that already thrives in our neighborhoods instead of something that needs to be introduced
The Ranch & The Lost Restaurant
As a Frontier Fellow at Epicenter in Green River, UT I became obsessed with an abandoned ranch house kitchen, a lost restaurant and a memorable molasses cookie.
Perpetual Piñata Parlour
A four-day carnival about bureaucracy, capitalism, and language barriers that was presented in St. Petersburg, Russia for Art Prospect Festival. Visitors to the festival were guided by miming facilitators through a series of lost-in-translation American and Russian folk games, accumulating points of unclear value before participating in a collective piñata-breaking ceremony. This project commissioned by CEC ArtsLink.
With Flux FactoryArt Prospect Festival • Saint Petersburg, Russia • 2015