Core Area, 2013, Hahnamuela archival inkjet paper & silver pencil, 30 X 20 Inches.
Build Into Slope, 2013, Hahnamuela archival inkjet paper & silver pencil, 30 X 20 Inches.
Next Gen, 2013, Next Gen cement board, aged lumber, Persian rug, sound, 70 X 120 X 44 Inches.
Installation at The Kitchen, NY, for Parsons MFA Thesis Exhibition.
The series of photographs and sculpture were made in response to Hurricane Sandy and the post storm volunteer work I did in the Rockaways, NY.
The clean up effort was simultaneously an excavation and a re-construction, as I witnessed massive amounts of construction debris being hauled away while Mack trucks delivered the new. The TYVEK logo plastered the horizon- it was difficult not to think about an immediate future when these new construction materials would also be hauled away as storm debris. The research for the project brought me back through the geneaology of protective architecture beginning with the bunkers of WWII, through the fallout shelters of the 70's, and today with natural disaster shelters. How have these standardized materials and the resulting structures created a facade of safety as protective architectures?
Next Gen is an amalgamated structure, potentially collapsible and mobile, made of standard construction materials, situated on an export textile that can no longer be sited within a specific cultural context. A soundtrack is embedded inside the sculpture and can be heard while sitting on the rug.
The photographic series explores the phenomenology a new domesticity, contained by tarpaper and pinstripes, where the interior is a space for the public display of the private self. The images utilize the language of Minimalist art to draw connections between the history of industrialization and the inefficiency of our built environment in the current reality of Global Warming.