Our concepts of space and time today have expanded to include the molecular and the global, from the circulation of molecules of antidepressants through our bodies to the instantaneous transfer of capital in digital markets across the world. These are the disorienting moments that are difficult to perceive with the actual human eye, but that exist in the list of side effects in a pharmaceutical ad, the sagging of postindustrial economies, the proliferation of hand sanitizer dispensers, and the flicker of an iphone. In between lies the human body, a filtration point where all of these phenomena pass through and leave traces via physical or psychological effects. I work in multiple media, including video, sculpture, and painting, to explore these new cultural dimensions of space and time and their effects on the body.
In my digital videos, I often work with appropriated pharmaceutical commercials to produce works that are both nauseating and humorous, revealing the excess and repetition of our marketing systems and subsequent consumption patterns. I also film original footage of frenetic performances in the privacy of my studio space and edit them into sprawling, abstracted works that likewise wallow in repetition and consumption but veer into spaces of abstraction and boredom.
My sculptural works revolve around the deployment of found items, often pharmaceutical promotional items (such as clocks, office supplies, and stress balls), hand sanitizer dispensers, and advertisements. I work with abstracted forms in metal and plastic to support these amalgamations, producing figurative, sometimes disarticulated forms that reflect upon histories of the human body in sculpture. These sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward forms all speak to a contemporary sense of embodiment concerned with ideas of self-dosage, self-regulation, and a simultaneous molecular and global understanding of physicality.
I treat painting as a thoroughfare for its history in relation to chemicals, and more precisely, medicine and pharmaceuticals (the origin of the word "pharmaceutical" is the ancient Greek term "pharmakon," which means a material that is simultaneously poison and cure, and additionally means the medium of paint). I often paint on magazine advertisements (providing a virtually infinite number of highly signified surfaces), as well as traditional canvases and more recently, antimicrobial plastic sheeting. Paint application can range from delicate, complex abstractions to hurried splattering and uses everything from oil paint to iodine to enamel mixed with ground pharmaceuticals. I typically approach painting as a sculptural act, one that understands the application of paint as a kind of dosage and that leaves traces and residues of its process.
While each individual piece stands alone, the work functions optimally in installations of complicated arrangements, juxtaposing minimal gestures with messy, overloaded works. Colors, logos, and gestures reappear throughout the space to unite works that initially appear unrelated. The viewer is challenged to make sense not only of each work but the relationship to the works that surround it, much as one often comprehends their own body in the world at present. As do our bodies, these works serve as sites of knowledge and recording devices for our chemical and cultural histories.