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Artist’s Statement for Organic installations
For many people, certain natural sights and settings spark a sense of something greater than the self. We have all at some time experienced a sense of overwhelming awe by being present at the ocean, in a meadow, or watching the sun set from our kitchen windows.
My site-specific organic installations are meant to re-ignite the sensations attendant to such place-oriented experiences. By bringing volumes of materials gathered from the surrounding environment together with paint, sound and smell, these installations perform a sort of therapy on the squared white walls of the gallery box. Each installation consists of a number of enclosures which I fabricate out of sticks, vines, leaves, earthen plasters and reeds.
The walls are painted with washes of organic color; they are often muddied and here and there leaves adhere to patches of paint. The floors are ankle-deep in leaves, sand, chipped wood or pine needles, and from a half hidden boom box a continuous loop tape alternates playing the sounds of crickets, birds and trickling water. Most of my installations make use of slide images as well. These are projected into gauze “windows” built into an enclosure’s wall, or perhaps they are projected onto the cut top-side of a weathered tree-trunk.
When I first began creating organic installations, it was almost entirely a spiritual exercise for me. Besides the convenience of being able to legitimize weeks spent outdoors collecting rare gifts from forests and arboretums, “process” was extremely important, and I often found myself involved in various rituals and practices that enhanced my clarity and my ability to produce interesting and purposeful work.
Indeed, it is through these processes and rituals that I have come to see human beings as the crucibhle in which natural and artificial juices co-mingle. Acutely self-aware, we are the very definition of artificial and yet we consist of the same adenine, cytosine, guanine & tyrosine as a pond frog. We are neither artificial nor natural, yet we are somehow both, often at odds in a world that is increasingly concrete-dense and difficult to traverse. My organic installations are inextricably bound to the urban environments that surround them. Sky-scrapers and el platforms are visible through tiny peep-holes drilled in my window treatments and cars are audible as they idle in traffic just outside. By bringing natural materials inside, I seek to explore the contradictions that lie at the very heart of humanness, because just as there is no outside without an inside, there can be no nature without culture.
