In June 2001, a friend and I hopped a freight train from a small town in Florida bound for NYC. The idea was to travel free of charge, see amazing things, test personal resolve, and to do something I’d previously thought impossible. I brought a video camera and captured a view of America few people get a chance to see these days – the secret corridors reserved for commerce & industry, always hidden behind walls of foliage and often running parallel to major highways. I brought a sketchbook and made drawings of rail yard shacks and other places where we slept. After a week of trains & a little hitchhiking, I arrived in NYC, and a new chapter in my life and work began.
This was just before the last year of my undergraduate studies in Architecture at the University of Florida. I fell in love with the poetic works and writing of John Hejduk and Lebbeus Woods, the Situationists, & Goethe – in them, I found an architecture that told a story, and models that spoke of music. Hejduk and Woods created mythologies surrounding their work which, much to my delight, often required the accompaniment of a new vocabulary or visual language to fully enjoy – a specific element that made a big impression on me. I’d been drawing and painting since childhood, and gradually came to treat architecture more like a multi-disciplinary fine arts degree - always nudging the boundaries of my personal curricula in far-flung directions. I dealt with my struggle in architecture by embracing my strong points – my final undergraduate project consisted of a series of watercolor paintings that described a procession of movement, light, space, and time. These veiled light studies were both architecturally informative and abstract, describing a moment in space while insinuating something more sublime – echoes of the country flying past the aperture of a freight train car, fluttering light broken by lines of trees, free movement – instead of suffering through literal model building, I was able to channel my experience in a relevant way.
Soon after I hopped trains, the National security climate following 9/11 intensified, begetting the Homeland Security Advisory System. I remember thinking that such a trip would be impossible now. If caught hiding on freight trains we would have been treated like terrorist suspects. I still watch footage of that trip, of two people simply moving freely from one place to another. A piece of that experience always influenced my architecture projects and continues to guide my work today.
I am now a painter who experiments on canvas, with installation, music composition, human behavior, the psychology of space, color, & line. Having performed and recorded music for over ten years, it has always played a large role in my work, both in architecture and fine art. I create installations and paintings while working with musical measure, time delays, feedback loops, harmonic frequencies and mathematic concepts in music. I am fascinated by the work of Tim Hawkinson and Paul Ramirez Jonas, both artists who incorporate music and sound into installations that raise questions about space, psychology & technology. In relation to these influences, my experience in architecture has also inspired my feelings about craft – my art is informed by the process of working by my own hand, and it is important for me to create narratives that involve my body and carry a personal signature, whether it be a brushstroke, fingerprint, stylistic imperfection, or a piece of music.
In New York, I continue to branch out in many directions. For the past three years I have focused on drawing & painting – I seek to create visually complex work with high levels of transparency, capable of both revealing and concealing its own layers while speaking to issues of measure, time, and light. To this end, my greatest achievements in the recent past are two large-scale oil paintings fraught with sliding lines and panels giving way to objective content swelling in the foreground, both part of an ongoing series.
I am also currently designing a project that focuses on currency, micro-economies, and how people behave when confronted with the responsibility of putting a price on art. The vessels for this idea will be small acrylic paintings which can be magnetically encoded and read by credit card machines.
Additionally, I teach an Arts in Humanities class to high school students at the Renaissance Charter School in Queens, and consider this new experience to be an integral part of my artistic development.