STATEMENT
I appropriate discarded objects seen by the roadside to create monuments to post-industrial America. The selection process is focused on man-made objects and structures such as: dilapidated houses, roadside memorials, tattered billboards, and other discarded materials. Each object is reinterpreted and presented as an artifact or a natural history museum model of something pulled from the contemporary landscape.
The subject matter is compiled by taking objects and photographs from degenerated public spaces. The areas that I’m interested in are places that average citizens routinely pass by but are not easily allowed access to: The medians of state highways, caged in parking lots and bank-owned abandoned houses. Though physical access to these areas is difficult, they contribute to our visual understanding of the landscape. Once the photographs and objects are collected I decide how to reinterpret each subject. Some of the objects require only a small amount of intervention to provide them with the pathos of shared cultural moments; when an object has a detailed surface I use hyper-realistic drawing to emphasize the object’s rich texture. While other subject matter requires an injection of fantasy to create the same allure. This is done by working the original imagery past the realm of natural phenomenon, combining found objects with color and self-made motifs to create a sculpture, or casting objects in layers of resin to look like a geographic core sample from an unknown place.
The purpose is to evoke a sense of wonder from the banal byproducts of our failed but once successful modern society. Instead of merely pushing these man-made items into the peripheral of our everyday routine, I recreate the curiosities that happen when they depart from contact with people to move, decay, and harbor with other items to create monuments to cultural disaffection.