In 2019, I made my first multi-panel glass work The Veldt, commissioned by curator Liz Park for an excellent show, This Skin of Ours at the Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University.
From 2019: “The Veldt” is made up of 18 individual panels that mount to the wall in a grid via a cleat system. Utilizing licensed imagery from Adobe Stock photos, I selected the most basic glyphs to illustrate measurement (a measuring tape and set squares) and the action of button-pushing (demonstrated by the central female figure) and the numerous images of buttons. I added images of flies and bees to depict small nuisances, blemishes on the skin, wounds, or other imperfections. My work is not an illustration of the 1950 Ray Bradbury story, but I am interested in the framework of this parable. The female figure was found through Adobe Stock with the search term of "woman touching screen," but can also be seen as a white woman with her back to the viewer/world (at a time when a majority of white Americans vote for Trump and Trumpism) and in thinking about technology, I have essentially created a static touch-screen made of kiln-formed glass.
It’s currently in the show BODY MAPS: Works from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections in Conversation with Past Exhibiting Artists at the University Art Museum in Albany.
The artists in Body Maps explore the relationship between the body and the self. As they navigate personal geographies and histories, their bodies act as stand-ins for larger cultural experiences. The surfaces they explore—the picture plane, maps, skin, walls, floors, city streets—always contain multitudinous depth revealed through the traces of their actions. These actions include navigating real spaces in performances and feats of physical endurance documented through video or photographs, mapping the flat terrain of prints or paintings, or translating bodily surfaces into casts or 3D-printed forms.
Buzz Buzz
I started using bugs in my work about 15 years ago, but mostly flies and ants. This was the first work that had bees.
Some things about bees:
•climate change
•sweetness + sting
•pollinators
•yellow + black
I’ve just seen (on tv) a swarm of bees attack tennis player Carlos Alcaraz. Play was stopped for nearly two hours as a bee man named Lance came to ‘humanely’ vacuum up the hive protecting the queen who had installed herself in or on the Spyder cam apparatus.
“Spydercam is a cable-suspended camera system, and rigging system used in making motion pictures, television and at athletic stadiums. It uses computer controlled winches to drive synthetic lines connected to a crane, truss or buildings to achieve multidimensional, repeatable movement.” - their website
Bees1 are known as a species of coalmine canaries – an essential species whose demise spells warning for the rest of us. Numerous climate activists have attempted their own disruptions at tennis events by running on the court and gluing their feet to the court; wearing tshirts that got them kicked out of the stadium; making a mess with confetti thrown on court but you guys, the bees managed to suspend play for 110 minutes and make a story of themselves the world over.
Also
I’m happy to also share images of my exhibition, An Audience, up now at Chicago’s Document gallery.
And earlier in the week there was a review in the local paper New City.
Further Reading:
Climate Change: It’s a Buzzkill for Bumblebees, Study Finds by Kendra Pierre-Louis and Nadja Popovich
These particular bees were actually killer bees, hence the Wu Tang references