Pillow Talk

2014
Textile on plywood pedestals
Pillows: 16 x 16 x 6 ea, 52” high on pedestals

In the near future, everything we bring into our homes will be able to talk to everything else. This emerging technology will allow us to achieve a world of unlimited creature comforts and provide the perfect expression of our consumerist desires. 

We are building an Internet of Things where we can seamlessly communicate and ultimately merge with the products we buy. We can talk with them on lonely nights, letting them archive our most private thoughts and our darkest secrets, secure in the knowledge that our new digital companions will always be there for us acting in our best interest.  It’s going to be wonderful. Really…it is.

Invisible Suburb

2013
3D printed PLA plastic, plywood
21" x 24" x 24"

Invisible Suburb offers the viewer a drone's-eye-view of a suburban neighborhood masked in a 21st century camouflage reminiscent of the digital shroud used by government installations on Google Maps.

Pangloss I & II

2013-14
Textile
58” x 84”   &   33" x 33" respectively

Pangloss gets its name from the bufoonish, Optimist philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide. I have made the piece from jeans that have developed holes from everyday wear and tear. I cut only the areas of the denim that have become frayed and pieced them back together into a patchwork quilt that consists of more hole than quilt.

The character Pangloss is famous for greeting the horrors of life (flood, earthquake, war and pestilence) with the sentiment that: if we live in the best of all possible worlds, then the outcome, no matter how horrible, must be the best amongst the possibilities.

Making this quilt is an exercise in futile optimism - that one could create order and warmth from worn and tattered scraps.

A Difficulty at Shadow Glen Estates

2014
Mixed Media
72” x 48” x 48”

The story of a difficulty that may or may not have arisen in an average American Suburb. There may have been a youth uprising and there may have been casualties. Then again, you can’t really trust anything you read, hear or even see.

This Revolution Sucks

2014
Wood, plexiglass, Arduino microcontroller and repurposed consumer electronics
48” x 42” x 33”

The disappointment of watching the victories of the Arab Spring being co-opted and then crushed by the most violent and regressive elements of society made me wonder what a revolution would look like in the largely pacified and doughy American suburbs. 

I imagined a social media frenzy of disaffected suburbanites growing bored of the revolution at the very moment when they have overthrown the power structure, leaving a vacuum that would inevitably be filled by leaders worse than their predecessors.

Dead Pixels

2014
Plywood, tar paper, black sand
~36” x 24” x 8” each / installation dimensions variable

The camera on a drone is where the real world and the digital world come together because everything looks like a pixel if you view it from a high enough altitude. Suburban houses look like identical units that, when combined, make up a larger entity. Individual homes that contain authentic histories and real lives simply look like nondescript pixels to a satellite.

Compression Error One, Two & Three

2014
Framed Photographic Documentation
16-1/2” x 20-1/2” each

The compression error is the ghost in the machine and the authentic voice of the network. The network is controlled by machines but the data on the network was created by us. Thus, those ghosts that spontaneously appear due to random machine errors can be seen as a collective unconscious for the digital age; a computer generated average of our hopes, dreams and desires.