Statement

When I began my life as an artist I scavenged urban refuse - made temporary installations, and thought about the subjectivity of the art-making process.   I wanted my work to seduce the viewer into believing that what they saw was art, while at the same time cause them to question its existence.

During the early ‘80’s I found it more interesting to think about how social space is negotiated by its users. Using spatial arrangements I organized my work to instigate anonymous relationships, behavioral proclivities and public flirtations. I wanted to play the role of the unseen cupid and the backroom troublemaker.

Since the mid ‘90’s I have focused on different ways to give access to informational materials such as  books videos , maps , etc., as a ploy to set-up temporary communities . Currently, other life forms such as lizards, birds , fish and plants have been added to the work as metaphorical stand-ins for ways we behave, relationships we have, and places we hope to visit.

My work falls somewhere between sculpture, architecture & design. Though trained in sculpture I have built permanent and temporary projects in Europe and the United States that range in site and scale to include urban space, parks, exhibition design, libraries, domestic spaces, and furniture. Whatever form the work takes, it considers the link between the social/political world and the private psychological one. My approach is to combine humor and cynicism to zoom in and out of the conditions, which organize us as a culture, thereby hoping to affect us as individuals. My focus is on the ‘down time’ when one eats, reads and is in repose, as the time when the ‘where’, ‘who’, ‘what’ , and ‘how’ are most evidenced. It is with this focus that I arrange space, orchestrate intimacy, and turn the public into unknown performers.

The adage of  "what you do in public is different than what you do in the privacy of your own home" explains how and why my interest in public space has moved from the street to the institution to inside the domestic environment. I try to highlight and confuse the differences between these sites in an attempt to promote a social breakdown of content and context.

 

Leaving Home

The habits of domestic life are transposed onto the street. How we walk,talk,eat,relax is negotiated onto the scale of the public site. We leave our home and carry it like a backpack throughout the day. We take it with us to the street, the theater ,the subway ,the mall. We take our walls, chairs, libraries and vanities with us.

We put on a coat and think of it as a warm bath. We buy a newspaper to fit around us like a mobile home. We sit in a park and find the same seat as yesterday. We drink a coffee to make the public space our living room. We take a train to get under the covers of the book. We wear sunglasses to separate our room from another. We look in car windows to try to locate our reflection in a context. We cross the street and try to remember why we left home.

Nature

I grew up in New York City and am a fifth generation manhattan-ite . Because of this, nature had always been an abstract, considered “not bad if seen from a car”. I therefore regard nature as something alien, to be looked at from a distance and treated as a specimen. On occasion I have used ‘natural ‘elements in my work as a human substitute, a social divider or simply as an optimistic presence. I feel that the animal kingdom, unlike that of us humans, is unmediated and not defined by the encyclopedic dictates of the pre-requisite pedigree, and therefore less complicated. I consider the natural world as information similar to a book , film or video. It is a material to be worked with—a material like any other.