Two photographs support an implied thesis on the ontological significance of patterning (in the presence of the ordinary, the living, and the actionary). Without documentation of the performative action, the space between the two images exists only as a conjuring within the mind of the viewer. The body of the Artist is imagined in its effort against and within an axiomatic Earth landscape. This permits an artificial memory of the happening, while artifactual evidence alone recalls the poetic sentiment of twenty-eight days’ labor. Simultaneously, this creates a hesitancy in establishing a temporal relationship between the two landscapes, unbinding them from notions of “permanence,” “lasting,” and “being” in general.

An instinctual action is made extraordinary through scale alone, wherein the repetition of a stone’s throw ritualizes the ordinary,  and yet remains entirely understated beside the glyphic and terraformic works —neolithic and industrialized— which ornament the American continent. Two sonnets, cast in sediment, enacted as the only logical solution to creating contemporary sculpture, On Order and Being proposes a call to create work; plain, balanced, precedented, (il)logical, and defensible. “To supplant place, and move that which is discrete the shortest meaningful distance; creating an archaeologic-architecture, wherein the invisible implies the profound, and the meaningless mirrors the sublime.”

Participating in a regional tradition of folk architecture, the SOUTH KITSAP SUPERBIND grounds a once-mobile mid-century trailer—an engineered unit for low-cost, autonomous living—into perceived permanence amongst its site; a suggested stasis which double-backs on itself under a plastic skin of Day-Glo orange. This color is borrowed from the local logging industry as a signal for temporary intervention by way of claim gates, roadway flags, and marked trees.

In a self-described work of Industrial Mannerism, the SUPERBIND blurs the relationship between a history of timber extraction, our resource dependent economy, and the old growth forests of the Kitsap Peninsula into a work so specific to its site as to become obtrusive. This hyper-locational dissonance magnifies the nuance of a socio-geological ecosystem at odds with itself—a community sustained via deforestation + yet signaling attempted environmental coexistence. Folk ornament and rough cut beams exist only behind the colored-context of their industrial origin—transforming the handicraft appeal into a rubberized mirage.

An open loop tracks the movement of a vertical sailing stone. Transplanted from its origin on the desert floor and secured in place using traditional industry hardware, Halted Rhythm brings together an object of folklore with the highway road-cut infrastructure found throughout the Western United States.

colored pencil on paper
26" x 36"
Dewey, Arizona

The proposed Weeping Wall explores the geologic impacts of extractive industry in the age of the Anthropocene. A large stone of ochre—the earth pigment famously used by early humans—sourced from an open-pit mine, is embedded into the gallery wall, and subjected to a circuitous flow of falling water. As the boulder erodes, the iron-rich pigments stain the white wall, leaving behind artifacts of passing time. The work exists as a geologic hourglass: a mass of earth at odds with gravity and time to create a contemporary landscape painting of dynamism and impermanence.

granite from public land, plexiglass boxes
each box 30" x 30" x 12”

Public land use is divided. There are those who value its wilderness, and those who desire its value. The Bureau of Land Management defends a need to balance these competing goals: mineral production and environmental protection. This balance encourages commercialized prospecting—industrialized coring of the landscape to locate rare minerals for later extraction— while simultaneously highlighting attempts to maintain wild land.

Split Estate offers this story of division, examining the relationship between production and preservation in an effort to equate that which lies broken with that which remains complete.