(a project in progress)

Overview:    This is currently a continuation of my practice in exploring consumer landscapes. The logic of the retail big box store is as familiar as highways, strip malls, or downtowns—a common vernacular, a matrix of popular culture, an architecture woven into the universal language of consumption. Through the visual technique of Mise en abyme, I intentionally and playfully reflect my personal histories and professional practice by repetitively intervening with sculptural collage and photography.

Process:    In co-opting a studio space, I utilize in-store display cameras (tethered phones, tablets, and cameras) to combine and recombine consumer and commercial elements found throughout the store—stock photos, colors, displays, price tags, goods. These interventions, arranged as in-camera sculptural collages, are made without permission or destruction. The resulting imagery is then printed via a superstore’s photo department, serving as source material for a subsequent installation. These installations move back and forth, from in-studio to "in-store-studio" multiple times.

Myself:    Being raised in the American Midwest and now working as a commercial photographer, my engagements within these consumer landscapes carry a degree of complexity. Growing up, these spaces served as community hubs where commerce intertwined with personal interactions—I would get my hair cut, run into neighbors, see family, and play hide and seek through a fluorescent maze of shelves and displays. Now, having lived in Los Angeles for almost a decade, stepping into a "big-box store" overwhelms me with a wave of nostalgia; the sensory memories are deeply personal, evoking a sense of homecoming. However, my perspective on these spaces has evolved, now imbued with a critical lens shaped by my background in consumer image-making. With a seemingly collective inability to envision a world beyond global consumer capitalism, these reunions can still feel like navigating through a fluorescent maze.

An ongoing project from a basement in the Midwest. 

New American Quilts (NAQ) is a site-specific installation and photographic project simulating branded edifice and the promise of abundance, inspired by the tradition of American quilting and the performative technique of détournement. 

Adopting the formal conventions of the big box store as constraint, the patchworks are built on-site from found materials and products. These highly geometric arrangements are made without permission and left until disassembled by consumers and staff. Photographs of the patchworks are then “woven” into blankets with the assistance of Walmart's personalized gifts department.

New American Quilts has been awarded a grant from the VSCO Artist Initiative.

Mass: an installation project about creating visual disruptions in places of mass.

The way we consume images perpetuates the abyssal production-consumption cycle. This has contributed to a flattening of space and culture into “non-places,” as evidenced by the proliferation of the “Big Box” store (supercenter, superstore, or megastore). Mass is a series of installations that capitalizes on and intervenes in an ecosystem of already existing objects within the retail landscape. Components for site-specific installations are culled from products in the store and arranged for their formal relationships--repetition in color, form and type. The products are altered only in their relative position, yet their actual context remains the same. Using the very environment of their economy without permission or purchase temporarily lends them an aesthetic, punk quality, but this disruption has a very short lifespan before being dismantled and restocked by store staff and/or shoppers, dissolving back into the consumer goods lexicon they emerged from. The installations are photographed prior to being disassembled, printed in the store’s photo department, placed in unpurchased frames and staged as unsanctioned exhibitions in the store’s home department. Any given exhibition contains images of dozens of different installations; the longest running show being 30 minutes before the frames were ultimately purchased by attendees--i.e. consumers.

Unlike art objects that function similarly in a market of purchasable goods, Mass installations are cannibalizing the environment of these products and isolating them in their native non-space of consumer capitalism. They exist within their intended context and market, and the items ultimately serve their intended use: to generate profit and perform for consumers--something that in the end is unhindered by their fleeting life as art snapshots. Mass highlights, uses, and ruptures this system from the inside, without a net loss or gain and takes advantage of the ready-made showroom floor that is the florescent lights and endless aisles of the consumer landscape.  

Please visit the project website for more information: MassProject.biz

Press

Guate International Photo Festival 
Fast Company
Slate
National Public Radio
Gestalten
L.A. Times
Month of Photography LA
Issue Magazine
Mn Artists
Visual Supply Co.
Humble Arts Foundation

“Workplace Communities That Inspire and Innovate!” or “Where Life and Business Meet, Everyone Prospers!” or “Creating the Most Vibrant Workplace Communities to Help Businesses Flourish!”

“Workplace Communities that Inspire and Innovate!’ or ‘Where Life and Business Meet, Everyone Prospers!’ or ‘Creating the Most Vibrant Workplace Communities to Help Businesses Flourish!” is a performative exploration of the non-space: anonymized, alien structures that permeate the landscape of our post-global society. Utilizing the gaze of a compromised security feed to document colorful arrangements of fruits and balls, I transform otherwise mundane, ordinary spaces such as office building lobbies, bringing forth plucky absurdity and confusion for viewers IRL or elsewhere. Recorded remotely, my presence as an artist is ambiguous. I work in-parallel to these monotonous architectures instead to forge a process-oriented play-space antithetical to the dominant mode.

Another way of saying this could be: I’m an unsanctioned banana in a highly sanctioned world.