I play with architecture and language, disrupting their expected rational construction with humor and uncertainty. Poised in a moment between perpetual creation and imminent collapse, the architectural structures of my installations form an absurd tableau that the viewer can enter, and by so doing, become a participant in an irresolvable narrative. Scattered toy-like pegs and tacks, useless cuts, paint smears on patterned facades, sculpted mops, rags and black rubber drips parody the mishaps of an absurd building process. The structures’ incompletion reveals what remains and activates what could become.

Illusory tactics of painting complicate the installation’s physical presence, producing an unstable, performative reality, as if the architectural tableau emerged from a cartoonish, parallel world. By applying faux finishes, like painted wood-grain, and silkscreened patterns inspired by Japanese origami paper, I transform the materials into playful exaggerations. Though the structures seem solid, wood and walls are often of foam construction, belying the appearance of weight. The vivid colors used throughout the installations have a dual nature: at once bright and cheerful, they also possess an unsettling intensity. By disorientating the known, these works assert the agency of unknowing in meaning’s construction and implicate ourselves in the process.

Prints

The silkscreen prints provide another means for reconsidering architecture as both metaphor and process of becoming. The print designs are based on the scale models I build to develop the full-size installations. The process of translating the handmade three-dimensional miniatures through digital technology back to hand printed designs is a central aspect of the work’s inward humor.