About The Work 

Although I am best known for making large-scale commissioned works in glass, all of my art shares a similar visual language. I use whole parts - either enameled, colored sheets of glass, or paintings on linen - that are atomized into hundreds, if not thousands of pieces that are thoughtfully reassembled into cohesive patterns. More than merely employing my secret pattern language, my public and speculative works are landscape based, are focused on the natural world, and are anchored in techniques of landscape representation that I have mined, combined, and misappropriated. What differentiates the larger works, beyond material transformation and physical scale, are their contextual relationships and necessary interaction with the public. They combine my mind-geography theories with external influences.

My latest work is about memory and mapping.  In it, I revisit places that are significant to me. In my visual language of re-composed, layered-up, painting-parts I catalogue actual locations into dreamy meditations. The resulting works are reveries that I physically present as succinctly bounded and attainable works viewed as thought fragments speaking to a much greater context.

My fascination with cartography started at a young age during cross-country road trips with my parents and siblings. Perched between my parents, I’d be the navigator, spending hours comparing the real scenery with the road atlas visuals. We camped in each of the lower 48 states, experienced different climates, geological formations, flora and fauna, and fragments of past civilizations in the landscape. Later, my map obsession was fed by studying urban morphology and design. 

In my current landscaped based work, I combine visual expressivity and formal composition to make reveries that utilize and re-deploy visuals usually found in maps. Like maps, the underlying structure is a grid. Unlike maps, the grid units are covered under translucent and veil-like layers. Like maps, the grids imply coordinates in space. But here the grids are open-edged and continue off the picture plane, making them less about mapping and more about a riff on scale-less-ness, denying their use to apprehend and domesticate space. The works are purposefully ambiguous fragments made via remembrances; their subjects are idealized and unapologetically nostalgic.