Landscapes
Our body is our home. The Earth is our home. The Earth is our body.
Most of these sculptures depict the continuity between what we often perceive as inside and outside of our bodies. The pyramids sometimes interspersed with thick black lines (“Watershed” and “Development” #1 and #2) are a schematic I invented to suggest suburbia as seen from an airplane. “Garden of Destruction” depicts cultivation and celebration of a garden that is overgrowing the house within it.
“Compassion 4 U” renders a field of Phragmites australis, an invasive wetland grass that has grown to large monocultural fields in the New York metropolitan area. These fields catch fire easily when dry in the fall. In this scene, the “fire” might be Enlightened Mind emanating from (leafy) Green Tara represented within the fire halo.
dualities made whole
These sculptures bring illustrations of thoughts that might be considered opposites: industrial agriculture vs. community gardening and suburban fragmentation versus a communal palace, into a single object in an attempt to suggest aspects of one inherent in the other.
Industrial Parks
“Industrial Park” is on one of my favorite oxymorons. These sculptures represent environments contorted by arrogance and avarice.
Reclaiming garbage
I’ve always been interested in creating sculptures from consumer packaging (see the McPalaces above). In the 1980s I went through a brief period of making political statements out of supermarket packages and smuggling them in to stores and leaving them on the shelves.
These sculptures incorporate discarded items, a used tire from an SUV and two-liter soda bottles, into landscapes. So much human refuse circles the world that we can’t escape it. With these sculptures I imagine actively integrating what we now consider waste back into our lives.
Aspects of this seem inevitable if humans endure on this Earth.