STATEMENT

I am a mixed media artist who makes indoor and outdoor works related to the natural world. Rooted simultaneously in science while evoking the fantastical, my long-term study of plants and animals expands my imagination in generating ideas for my work. My ideas take form in installations, sculptural reliefs, oil paintings and drawings.

ORCHID-BAT SERIES
The Orchid-Bat series is inspired by the evolutionary ability of organisms to adapt to their environment. This body of work aims to explore the heightened intensity of polymorphous sensation. Rooted simultaneously in science while evoking the fantastical, these works depict the fusion of bats and orchids. The appeal to me of science is not to use hard facts to explain the world, but rather, utilizing science as a medium to pry open and reinterpret things. The stimulus for the Orchid-Bat series originated from bats’ physical abilities to resemble the plants around them as a camouflage technique and from the way orchids can become more visually similar to the animals that eat their nectar in order to seduce them into pollinating. The two species transcend their existing boundaries, in a play on survival of the fittest, using mimetic adaptation to gain a new identity. Through my work, I investigate my role as the artist as creator and Creation as metaphor.

LA JARDINIÉRE
La Jardinière is a stunning vision of an abstracted vertical garden; where authentic-nature and simulated-nature elements coincide through multilayered planes of wall painting, representations of tree bark from industrialized wood, ceramic pressed bark, direct slip casts, floral representations in ceramic, and collected natural elements. The incorporation and fusion of these components is Inspired by the urban experience of mediated nature settings, including elaborately planned parks and gardens, and through images of exotic places seen through the media.  I present a tribute to endangered tropical plant species and coral reefs as they are nestled among locally inspired and collected natural elements.  I explore the contexts in which we perceive our environment, and the multi-facetted layers of awareness and examine the nature in, and of, our surroundings.

PROSPECT FLORA
Another recent installation, “Prospect Flora” is inspired by the development of Prospect Park and how its changes parallel the population of Brooklyn at large.  This piece includes ceramic elements of architectural details cast onsite of a detailed bridge facade, walkway and surrounding planters. Nestled in the same area, are a dozen magnificent London Plane trees, Brooklyn’s most common tree, which is a hybrid of the native American Sycamore and the Oriental Plane. Unlike the American Sycamore, which is easily susceptible to disease, the London Plane is resilient and fast growing. These two plant species from opposite sides of the earth, fused together and evolved into a stronger being, which form a perfect metaphor for the melting pot of Brooklyn. My installation pairs the ephemeral bark of this tree with stony ceramic casts, against a site-specific painting abstracted from graffiti tree carvings.

The site-specific wall painting on which the other elements are installed, is based on trees nearby which were carved by people over many years wanting to make a mark on the world and thus into the tree.  The tree carvings can be seen as simultaneously beautiful, an expression of love for someone, scarification and humankind’s dangerous impact on our environment.  Actual tree bark, protected with a shiny acrylic surface, is nailed overtop of the wall painting, evoking how signage was posted onto trees throughout history.  The piece represents how our society gives life to and reveres nature and also how we abuse and overlook it.

GILDED PHTYOPHILIC BATS
Gilded Phytophillic Bats is comprised of over 30 life-sized, gold-plated ceramic bat sculptures, hanging in a willow tree along the Brooklyn waterfront. I created the piece to raise awareness of the mysterious environmental problem causing widespread death in many bat colonies in New York. Gold-plating the sculptures, expresses the precious role bats play in our ecosystem and recontextualizes bats’ stigmas of being dangerous or grotesque.

GOWANUS CANAL SPECIES MURAL
This painting is a utopian view of the potential for the Gowanus Canal region and includes species of animals that have been able to inhabit the region in recent years. The canal region is a mostly post-industrial area and former dumping ground in Brooklyn, New York. A developer investing in the revitalization and cleanup of the area and waterway commissioned my painting, which is installed at the boat launch site of the Gowanus Dredgers.

The Gowanus neighborhood was originally a tidal inlet of small creeks in the saltwater marshland of South Brooklyn. These marshes and meadows teemed with fish and other wildlife. As the need for navigational and docking facilities in New York City grew, in the 1860s the Gowanus Canal was finished. An expressway led to the eventual decline of the Gowanus Canal and marked the beginning of truck distribution and in 1955 the regular dredging of the Canal ceased as it was no longer cost effective. The Gowanus Canal had outlived its usefulness. The final blow to the canal happened in 1961 when the flushing station broke and was abandoned for the next thirty-seven years. The 1970s ushered in a new sense of urbanism in South Brooklyn and the "Brownstone Revival" drew the middle class back from the suburbs to the neighborhoods of the Gowanus. This movement was combined with a new appreciation for environmental issues that continue to be the driving force for reviving the Gowanus Canal today. These efforts have resulted in the Wastewater Treatment Facility's construction and in 1989 raw sewage was no longer flushed directly into the Gowanus Canal. However, on days of extreme rain, much of New York's sewage runs untreated, combined with street water runoff, into the surrounding waters, the Gowanus Canal included, so much effort is still needed.
*info from Gowanus Dregers website