How do you describe your own art practice?
Tangental storytelling through form, incorporating elements of soft psychedelia, lyrical abstraction, lateral narratives, and ephemeral appropriation. What I cryptically refer to as thoughts about a subject, turned into forms about a subject.
Also, someone recently said I make puzzles.
A Segment of Translation (F. Kiesler’s Mind Form)
Digital print in double-sided lightbox, plaster, wood, paint, xerox text
300cm x 1200cm x 16cm
2015
Installation view at the Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Which question or theme is central in your work?
Thematically it would be visualising what a subject undergoes when it grows. Recording the way ideas change and evolve when thought about at length.
As for questions…
What does thinking look like?
What are the elements and materials that collaborate to compose a language, and what can these look like? Specifically, how can this approach encourage forms to converse and evolve into something different as the result?
Not terribly unique questions, but in asking these through the work, propositions emerge that exemplify an individual’s ability to author difference. It’s a kind of allegorical abstraction as the harmonic equivalence to growth.
Slab (Banana)
Plaster cloth, acrylic paint, epoxy clay, screws, dried flowers
45cm x 40cm x 15cm
2018
What was your first experience with art?
This is that origin story question…
Early 90’s alternative scene in Calgary, Canada. Bearing witness to the creation of sub-culture composed by people not much older than me. Then realising a lot of these participants were somehow involved in the art school up on the hill. It’s a trajectory that’s been simplified in retrospect. The context-arena of art presented an opportunity to do things differently, to make things differently, to think differently, yet always be in conversation with a community. Participating in a dialogue by making things.
Cut Flowers
2018
Installation view at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto, Canada
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
Seeing things I’ve never seen, to think thoughts I’ve never thought.
So… looking, and then thinking.
Time is inspiring.
The ways things grow, evolve, and abstract is inspiring.
This dot we’re on is a diverse one, and that’s inspiring.
Life is rather dynamic at times, even at its worst. So are people, and so are things.
Difference is inspiring.
A Floating Arrangement (The Formation of a Pyramid Through Lavender Steps)
Brass, copper, enamel alkyd paint, epoxy clay, nylon string, plaster, wire
103 x 14 x 7.5 cm
2022
What do you need in order to create your work?
It’s a little like a recipe in a cookbook, where substitutions are encouraged:
A subject to think about.
A proposition to communicate the results of the above.
A space to present (this could be a lot of things, not just the literal).
A problem to adress.
A doubt to help edit.
A good vibe.
And recently, a beach.
Two Speakers with Void Screens (The Story of Stripes and Dots, Chapter 9)
+ An Arrangement of Units Suspended in the Air
Acrylic ink, plaster, wire, paint, polymer clay, wood, cloth, speakers, audio track
2017
Installation view at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
Encountering the growing artist-run centre scene in Tokyo was a revelation. Places like XYZ Collective, Lavender Opener Chair, and 4649 are evolving an almost sub-cultural history of artist and artist-run activity in Japan through publishing, performance, exhibitions, and special projects. This reminded me that a real positive in art is the ability for actions to communicate an expanse of ideas and approaches for conceptual thought. That participation is a form of world building. And that there can be more than one.
Momentary Arrangement of Modelled Narrative Form (Cobra Conjuring Three Orbs)
B/W Lambda chromogenic print on baryta paper
30cm x 40cm
2021
