“Figure it out,” my father said as I stood next to him in our garage at age ten. He left me there alone with an assortment of tools, a mechanics manual and the task of fixing the alternator of his car. Although he was no longer in my life by the time I turned sixteen, the words my father spoke to me that evening still echo in my head as I continually work to understand the relationship between my artistic process and the human endeavor.

As an adolescent, I spent my hours after school in a factory working injection mold machines the size of city busses and crimping hundreds upon hundreds of stove pilot assemblies, engraining into my mind the formal and intellectual foundations of my work. During my undergraduate studies, I began rendering common mechanical objects autonomous through the use of electronics. I explored the relationship between mechanical objects and the values of contemporary society and how these connections define the identities of individuals who interact with them.

Throughout my academic years, I was highly influenced by the opportunities I had to view contemporary art. In 2003, at age nineteen, I traveled to Europe on an independent art program. I was profoundly challenged and encouraged by the works I saw at the Biennale, Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern. I can vividly remember standing outside the Venice Biennale telling my professor that my brain hurt. The exposure to work of that quality on such an immense scale was overwhelming. The experience not only solidified my belief that being an artist was possible, it set the standard for what I, as an artist, hope to achieve.

I have spent the last four years outside of school focusing myself as an artist while developing as a person and I’ve learned to incorporate my ever-expanding life experiences into my process. My initial work was a reflection of my father’s absence and my attempt to gain some element of control. However, now that I am older and more evolved, I am willing to cede a bit of that control and open myself up to the process of the unknown in order to introduce more human variables into my work. While I continue to work with industrial objects, now rather than simply rendering them autonomous, I’ve begun to manipulate them in order to capture more complex and nuanced expressions of the human endeavor. Fear, ambition and the shifting notion of home: these are the themes currently asserting themselves in my work.

Art has long been my reason in life and I look at grad school as a resource to help shape my voice as an artist, not as the source that will provide me with one. I want to be surrounded by a faculty that will dissect, question and challenge my work in order to build upon the ideas and practices I have developed solitarily. The benefit of an education is evident as I look back the ways in which my work progressed through college and I’m confident that my work has developed to a point where re-immersing myself in an academic community will greatly benefit my artistic pursuit.

Here’s the video of my tree being set on fire. Please refrain from making any references or connections to the destruction of things that are beautiful. I apologize for the blue streaks, its a bit unprofessional, but then again, I make things out of match sticks.

I used over twenty five hundred matches to build a cherry tree. Who knows why. Maybe Bobby Dylan made me do it, or maybe it was my OCD, obsession with construction, or the fact that I was broke and still needed to make things. The project began in the summer of 2008 and finally ended January 22, 2009, with the long awaited igniting of what proved to be another consuming endeavor. I was glad to see it go in glory, rather than the slow deconstruction it had experienced while making it due to the intense heat waves during the summer. Sure I would have loved to see it last, possibly be shown and shared with others, but it was necessary to get it out of my space and out of my head. And of course I am able to share it here, with anyone who cares to look, and don’t fret, the video of its destruction will soon be aired, as quickly as youtube decides to process it.

The Mold for Casting A Large Amount of Skeleton Forearms

I am only partially through the casting process and have taken a bit of time away to work on a different piece. However, I am excited about the direction the piece is going and the content it is taking on. It seems the work that I make about repitition, middle class America, and the monotony of life’s structure, have a growing importance and relevence as current issues in America escalade.

As I think back now, upon that photo, I am comforted by the thought that all the particles in existence must move through the space of time as I do.

I wonder if I and they are the same, gliding along lifes unstoppable gravity, or if we are perhaps engaged in an eternal struggle to break free from the parameters of physics and go our own existential directions.