Tethered Oscillator, 2020

Dimensions: 10ft x 30ft x 30ft

Media: CD and DVD discs, monofilament, cable ties, ratchet tie down straps, bungee cords, irrigation tubing, hardware, custom-built Theremin cases, Theremin, and speakers with amplifiers

The design for the installation was inspired by a Coupled Oscillator, in which springs connect two masses in a tug-of-war that continues to search for a return to equilibrium. In this installation, the center spring is the viewer/performer, who can try to play both theremin at once due to the fact that they are positioned close enough to appear to be in reach. However, the two theremin are separated far enough that it is difficult to affect both simultaneously necessitating two people six-feet apart with one at each theremin is needed as they communicate and play together on instruments known for being touch-free.

Event Horizons, 2016

Dimensions: 15ft x 60ft x 20ft

Media: Donated CD and DVD discs, Monofilament, Cable ties, Ratchet tie down straps, metal, wood, hardware, and LED lights.

Additional Information: The interior lights are computer controlled RGBW LED lights that for this installation are set to go through over 300 colors in 8-minutes with all 5 vortexes changing simultaneously.  The shift is slow enough that at a causal pace, the color does not seem to change while a short pause or slower pace allowed one to recognize the change which affected the entire experience and made the depth of the vortices more mysterious.

Installed at the Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana

Lift, 2017

Dimensions: 8ft x 15ft x 15ft

Media: Donated CD and DVD discs, Monofilament, Cable ties, Aluminum, Stainless steel cable, and hardware.

Titled Lift, this installation has been designed for the skylights at the Nashville International Airport.  Inspired by landfills and black holes, the form will be similar to looking across a flat bed of water with a whirlpool drawing all the surrounding water into itself; however, the emphasis of this sculpture would be a vortex that is pulling all the memory discs upward like a black hole in space. 

Installed in the Nashville International Airport, Nashville, Tennessee

Lift (detail), 2017

Dimensions: 8ft x 15ft x 15ft

Media: Donated CD and DVD discs, Monofilament, Cable ties, Aluminum, Stainless steel cable, and hardware.

Installed in the Nashville International Airport, Nashville, Tennessee

Shipshape, 2015

Dimensions: 8ft x 8ft x 12ft

Media: CD and DVD discs, monofilament, cable ties, wood, hardware, cable

Shipshape - in good order, trim and neat
The shape of this installation was inspired by ships on the Caspian Sea in combination with the optimistic attitude inherent in and the never-ending work of resource reuse and recycling.  Titled Shipshape, this sculptural ship, whose hull is made of discarded digital memory in the CD's and DVDs, is both rising and sinking into the floor.  From the bow, the waste appears perpetual and unending; while from the stern, the ship becomes a viewfinder for looking beyond and through the waste.

Installed at the From Waste to Art Museum in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

Forces of Nature: Whirlpools and Walmart Bath Rugs, 2008

Dimensions: 108 in x 116 in

Media: Walmart clearance bath rugs and duct tape

The text is a segment from a poem I wrote about color theory, time, and relativity.  It reads:

"perception is dependent on the relationships present relationships are dependent on perception is dependent on the relationships present relationships are dependent on"

Forces of Nature: Hurricanes and Slinkys, 2007-2010

Dimensions: six sculptures with the largest 30” x 96” x 72”

Media: Steel, irrigation tubing, cable ties, paint, and artificial grass

This three-year outdoor installation of Forces of Nature: Hurricanes and Slinkys, was designed for in the Live, Learn, Believe outdoor exhibition, Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky.  Inspired by diagrams of hurricane development and the “wonderful toy” the slinky, the inexpensive Slinky seems so simple, but the physics of the spring and theories of Hooke’s law visualize the limits of stress that can be endured before it cannot be corrected when the stress is removed. This outdoor sculpture combines these two visuals with a peaceful, but artificial, grassy eye of the storm.

Installed at Georgetown College, Georgetown, Kentucky

Forces of Nature: Blue Skies, Slinkys, and Hurricanes, 2020

Dimensions: three sculptures with the largest 18in x 72in x 72in

Media: steel, blue PEX tubing, hardware, and artificial grass

Inspired by diagrams of hurricane development and the spring movement of the “wonderful toy” Slinky (as the longest-running jingle in advertising history so memorably describes it), this delightful installation features three circular forms that appear to be large Slinkys connected at the ends into rings and circling perfectly-maintained “lawns” of artificial grass.

Reminiscent of inner tubes easing down a lazy river or bean bags in a living room, these sculptures provide playful, unusual benches with calm grassy centers at the eye of each storm.

Installed at Houston Heights Boulevard, Houston, Texas for 2020 True North.

Gaze-bo(ught), 2016

Dimensions of primary gazebo: 10ft x 10ft x 10ft

Media: Steel, resin, wood, artificial grass, paint, LED lights, trike, and umbrella

The primary sculpture in this installation is a gazebo in a gazebo in a gazebo. Each gazebo form is shaped like a gem and painted a saturated pink. The roof is made of pink resin panels that become a rose colored lens. When underneath, one is then bathed in pink light. The interior of the sculpture and surrounding ground is covered in thick artificial grass, which is always the perfect green and never needs to be mowed.

At night, the computer controlled RGBW LED lights set in the cove under the roof panels would slowly shift through several shades of pink as the light transitioned from white to red to white.

Installed in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Pre-fab(ulous) Environments, 2013

Dimensions: largest house 9ft x 8ft x 9ft

Media: Insulation Styrofoam panels, Styrofoam peanuts, die‐ cut paper, printed vinyl, dvd player, looped video, light, blue duct tape, tables and chairs

The little houses in Pre-fab(ulous) Environments were inspired by descriptions of the AD 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum.  The citizens of these communities lived with a volcano six miles away and thus the shape of volcano was a part of the landscape.  Forces of nature such as volcanoes are awe-inspiring and frightening.

Installed at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, Kentucky

Pre-fab(ulous) Post-fraction, 2019

Dimensions: 8’ x 8’ x 4’ 

Media: Insulation Styrofoam panels, Styrofoam peanuts, adhesive, vanilla air fresheners, artificial grass, painted plaster cast game pieces, light, table, and chairs

Through the artificiality of the Styrofoam and boardgames, this sculptural installation encourages touch and play engaging in a physical dialougue about individual and community approaches to control and distraction in a disposable environment. 

Tighten Your Belt, 2019

Dimensions: 29"x27"x27"

Media: Cast Iron, Styrofoam, artificial turf, steel, and adhesive

Just beyond suburbia, where the American Dream intersects with reality, the tension between nature and societal innovation is at the core of this narrative, offering an irony inflected dystopian vision of the suburban fantasy. 

In Tighten Your Belt: Ranch, the home cinches at the waist and yielding gathers and folds.   Surrounded and adorned with the perfect yards, the whimsy of the carved foam sits poised as if a ziggurat in the landscape.

Interest Only, 2017

Dimensions: 43" x 7.5" x 7.5"

Media: Bronze, steel, paint, acrylic, artificial grass, and soap 

Relating directly to the idea of obsolescence through its ephemeral nature, Interest Only erodes the exurban dream of abundant lives and orderly landscapes. Monopoly hotel soaps are like an interest-only loan; no principal or equity grows, but when totally spent and the soap dish’s patina has changed while a new soap house is pulled out and the cycle starts anew. Lessons or insights are washed away as the promise of the clean, fresh, American dream of success seems abundant. The bronze soap dish resembles the excavated, scarred earth that typically surrounds newly constructed homes prior to the addition of landscaping, which is waiting in the drawers below in the form of artificial grass, along with a supply of identical houses to maintain the cycle.

Iron Excavation: two story, 2021

Dimensions: 28" x 5" x 4"

Media: Cast iron, paint, and artificial grass 

This sculpture carries a heaviness and a melancholic lens excavating a decaying past catastrophe. Combining patinated iron and artificial turf, these sculptures scrape at perceptions of current affluence and assimilated assumptions that all is well.

Edge Friction: Star-wheel Rake, 2018

Dimensions: 12"x 36” x 3/8" 

Media: Glass, ceramic ink, and hardware

Edge Friction is a series of glass panels focusing on the interstates and highways that take drivers past a range of components that support a contemporary lifestyle: landfills, bales of hay, an old company coming down, a new distribution center going up, and so on. Road engineers adjust the "edge friction" encourage drivers to slow down or speed up by controlling how many or how few vertical elements are within the driver's vision. The background are photographs taken from the comfort of my truck, while the foreground layers doily-like spirals of text that are a hypnotic vortices with a mantra of "green grass" or "blue skies" that hides and interrupts the viewing of the landscape.

Tethered: Bell South, Singer, Royal, and Sony, 2020

Dimensions: 14" x 98" x 2" each

Media: Graphite on wood panel

During the COVID-19 crisis, the dining room in our house became my provisional office-studio in order to facilitate my creative activity while sheltering at home and minimizing public interaction.  As a result of this process of centralization and simplification, I returned to drawing with graphite on wood panels to capture and express the tensions produced by the pandemic during the months of April-July of 2020. 

Tethered: Sony (detail), 2020

Dimensions: 14" x 98" x 2"

Media: Graphite on wood panel

This series of artworks focuses on analog objects from the dustbin of communication technology. These mementos embody the desire to touch, share, and listen, but also serve as slow public service announcements that demonstrate a need for social distancing that conflicts with the need for social contact.  The rawness of the wood grain and formality of the frame design elevate the perception of value of these analog phones, typewriters, sewing machines, and cassette player by focusing attention on the connection between the sensual materiality of the objects, their design made for contact or communication, and the deferral of these intended destinies by the six feet that stretches them apart.  

Keep the Door Open, 2021

Dimensions: 36" X 13.5" X 4"

Media: Ink, player piano roll paper, beeswax, wood, and paint 

Poem reads from bottom up:
A SMILE.
THO’ YOUR HEART MAY CRY, DEAR,
WHEN YOU SAY GOODBYE, DEAR,
LEAVE ME WITH A SMILE,
MAYBE IT'S FOREVER
SO

This series of piano roll visual poems utilize players piano rolls that include karaoke-like sing-along text coated in beeswax. While the beeswax and layering strengthens the paper and firms the form, these silent memories feel inviting and vulnerable being displayed without frames.

Birds Sing, 2021

Dimensions: 11.25” x 11.25”

Media: Player piano roll and beeswax

Poem reads:
BIRDS SING THESE WORDS;
TENDERLY LEAVE ME WITH A SMILE
THO' LEAVE ME WITH A SMILE.
THO' AND LEAVE ME WITH A SMILE.

This series of piano roll visual poems utilize players piano rolls that include karaoke-like sing-along text coated in beeswax. While the beeswax and layering strengthens the paper and firms the form, these silent memories feel inviting and vulnerable being displayed without frames.

Daily Soaps, 2001

Dimensions of each stand: 28in x 20in x 25in

Media: steel, cast bronze, cast fiberglass, wood, cast soap, and water

Inspired by television soap operas, self-help books, spiritual rituals, and product marketing especially for skin whitening and hair straightening shampoo, each washing station features a hand-made, rose-scented soap that suggests it can wash off everything from guilt to apathy. As the soaps are used and the words disappear, the bronze cast soap dishes patina while the water gets cloudy which darkens the shadow below the fiberglass sink. An anticipated conclusion that is set on repeat if "Daily Soaps" marketing is successful.

Installed at the Old Watson’s Building, Knoxville, Tennessee