Portfolio

Our concept for Flight took off from one idea: simple forms coming together to form the quintessential childhood wonderment of a paper airplane in flight. We proposed to fly our giant paper airplane through the airport and we were granted the opportunity to do so.

Shohei and I worked together designing, engineering and manufacturing plans to devise a strategy for building and suspending a 16 foot airplane made of 231 airplanes. We enlisted Technique Architectural Products in Pittsburgh to cut and fold aluminum planes and weld collars to long spans of rods as well as make the overhead rigging frame. With our designs and their skills we manufactured all the parts for the sculpture.

I reached out to different people and institutions for some donations to help enhance our vision. Brian Fox with BASF and Fox Marketing helped supply the paints and materials needed to supercharge the colors. A generous donation of automotive paints, solvents and special primers was secured from BASF by Brian and his support for our project shows on almost every square inch of this sculpture.

We then hired Bruce Harvey at Pro Comp Custom to spray a perfectly smooth transition of beautiful custom color across rows of airplanes. We took up every square foot of his paint booth rotating planes in and out. It is visual candy expertly made. Working with Bruce moving planes around his shop with Shohei is a cherished memory. We all had jagur shots at 10am when the the job was done.

Shohei and I got to work putting all the parts together and doing a dry fit in Carnegie Mellon's metal shop. Once we were confident in our pre-assembly and rigging test we transferred the sculpture to the Pittsburgh International Airport. We spent 4 days installing Flight outside the arrivals terminal. It was pretty neat because people started walking up to tell us they liked it before we finished it.

This art work was made in collaboration with Lena Chen for her V-Air Residency and with support of MUST- Museo del Territorio Vimercatese.

This residency was created with the theme "DIALOGUES WITH CATASTROPHE. Reflections, practices, and visions for rebirth." Artists were invited to reflect on strategies and imaginaries related to how to emerge from the catastrophe, build the tools to respond, and imagine a possible rebirth.

Riposo is the Italian word for rest and it invited local inhabitants to do so as an antidote to the ever present pressures, responsibilities and general anxiety tied to contemporary life and hyper-productivity. Lena also staged a restful performance in the hammock at the conclusion of her residency.

Riposo is a site-specific Hammock installation at the Piazza Roma in Vimercate. The hammock is designed with a fabric that features the Piazza Roma digitally manipulated into a surreal dreamscape. Lena photo documented the public square in which the Riposo performance would take place. I collage the documentation together using techniques I've developed from my Desert Traveler collage series in 2015. I stitched the imagery in to a dreamlike landscape and we had it printed on to a hammock.
I've always loved hammocks, I slept on one in the beach town of Playas Negras, El Salvador. I stumbled into every night one in on the beach and slept like a baby.

I made Western Horizon with the idea that I would like to make roadside sculptures. I have driven through the southwest countless times and have been captivated by the expanse of the landscape. I have done a few projects about traveling through that region of the United States and documented the different highways and back roads.
A few years ago I found a call for a RFQ for Rattlesnake Rest along New Mexico’s portion of the I-40. The location is about 1 hour east of Albuquerque in the Southwestern tablelands and the outer edge of the high planes in the east. This grass land is flat and dotted with sagebrush and juniper. I meditate freely driving through this expanse and often muse on the many lives that have passed on foot or horseback. This particular stretch of the NM I-40 was laid directly over route 66, so it seemed totally appropriate to think about a neon sign (or lighted sculpture) in this exact location.
I did not get the nomination but I remained excited about the idea and commenced sketching and writing about two sculptures that I would soon begin to make. Western Horizon was the first to be built as a wall sculpture. Eastern Edge is the second wall sculpture and both would be mounted in opposing east-west directions.
The imagery is born from the history of horses, shapes of the landscape, roadside attractions, tragic conflicts, open spaces, colors of the morning, desert mysticism, wild gramma grasses, googie design, looking out the window, and prairie rattlesnakes. Every part is drawn into the story of the land and told in the neon sculpture.
Analog methods, contemporary materials and technology are blended together to build and illuminate this sculpture. Layers of acrylic were laser, prepped, painted and adhered together in to one solid piece. It was then threaded with LED filament, bulbs, and EL wire through hundreds of holes. The light animations were built with an old school timer circuit and cheap christmas LED string lights. I spent a good amount of time engineering the parts and figuring out the materials. I had a lot of fun doing little prototypes along the way which I hope to share in my blog in the near future.
Be on the look out for Eastern Edge which should be finished with before late November 2026. I hope to get these seen in a gallery, and to build them in a larger scale independent of a wall. It is destined to become a larger work.

Since 2007 my paintings had incrementally grown dynamically off the wall with a variety of materials. The progression of my paintings lead me to something more sculptural and immersive. I wanted to experiment with VR sculptures after I attended some creative VR workshop in 2017. I would trace my body and be traced with VR controllers that would track the movement and position and record as a line in virtual 3D space. The shell of a body was what remained. A series of performances took shape. I invented different methods of tracing my body using sticks to extend the VR controllers, rubber bands to hold buttons down, a gantry to suspend equipment from, springs and tethers to restrict movement to name a few.

This work culminated into the show Shadow and Dust at The Powder Room in Pittsburgh in 2018. The show included 4 performances of tracing my body using the techniques I had developed while simultaneously broadcasting the performance as it looked in virtual reality on the walls of the gallery.

Three light boxes were made for this show. Images of previous sculptures made in VR were printed on film and backlit. The glow of the backlit image being the analog for the VR headset as the two are similar with displayed imagery.