33 Oficina Creativo, Toffia, Italy, 2023
Interactive 3D animated video featuring custom sound piece and playable scanned artifacts from the surrounding region.
AZIMUTH
Screened at Night Lights Denver, Denver, CO 2023
3D animated video projection-mapped onto downtown Denver’s Daniels and Fisher clock tower building. Taking inspiration from the context of the clocktower site, AZIMUTH explores the relationship of positionality, perception, and the movement of time. The azimuth is an expression of the distance between a celestial object and an observer; a fleeting measurement as time is revealed through an interplay of light, shadow, and movement. Taking direct inspiration from the clock tower projection site, AZIMUTH charts one complete day/night cycle as the sun rises to its zenith at solar noon and sets at dusk, revealing the moonlit-midnight sky. An ancient sundial serves as the central feature upon which time is visibly understood in relation to the sun, moon, Earth, and ourselves.
Screenings at the Black Box Theatre, Boulder, CO - 2022
CURRENTS New Media Festival, Santa Fe, NM - 2023
Digerati Emergent Media Festival, Denver, CO - 2023
Throughout human history, we have used water, sand, atoms, the sun, moon, and stars, as well as clocks, calendars, and our natural rhythms among many other approaches to measure the passage of time. These materials, phenomena, and sensing devices can often be misaligned with our own instinctual perception of time. We have infradian (more than 24 hours), circadian (24 hours), and ultradian (less than 24 hours) rhythms that govern our understanding of time as humans that can often be at odds with one another. Infradian rhythms are like the female menstrual cycle - a process that takes roughly one month to complete, while circadian rhythms like sleep and wakefulness take place throughout one day, and ultradian rhythms like the process of a neurotransmitter cascading from the hypothalamus to the adrenal glands happen in an instant. My ongoing novel, ZEITGEBER follows an artist in the future as she discovers unforeseen symbols in Neolithic megalithic architecture on a research trip to different sites around the world. A zeitgeber is an exogenous signal that sets our circadian rhythm, a relationship between our bodies on a cellular level and the outside world. The symbols that she saw in the structures had appeared previously in her dreams, as well as the immersive video game experiences she makes in her practice. The relationship between her dreams, immersive games, and the symbols etched into stone begin to become impossible to distinguish, causing visions that produce more work in her practice.
Stay tuned for the completion of the novel, ZEITGEBER soon.
Solo Exhibition at Oregon Contemporary (formerly Disjecta), Portland, OR - 2021
Solo Exhibition at The Ohio State University Farmer Family Gallery, Lima, OH - 2022
We, the prepared
pay our dues to time, once,
twice, forever.
Folding and unfolding,
time remembers
what we shall prepare for
in the future
and what we have failed to prepare for
in the past.
Nature, drunk on instinct,
grounded in its own tangibility,
does what it pleases.
Earth shifts and adapts,
patient and assured as
it calibrates to the chaotic
pulses of nature.
We challenge it.
Count the number of times
the sun
rises and falls, rises and falls.
Prepare for hunger, prepare for pause.
Prepare for discomfort, prepare for isolation.
Harmony revolts,
even as
we propel our wishes into the presumed
space of tomorrow.
They scatter
on the surface of a drifting stream,
unorganized, patternless, lying heavy and flat,
until at last,
they fold into each other,
collapse into themselves,
and thrust forward
to to be eaten by the water
below.
Text in collaboration with Katrina Eresman
I am thankful to be a ghost now
02.14.20 - 03.20.20
Group exhibition at Aldea Gallery in Bergen, Norway with Sebastian Burger, Theodore Dart, and Caroline Turner (Anderson)
“I got here no thanks to my map, which is outdated and so dense with data that I could barely read it: a warren lines, numbers, words, or I think they’re words, in a language I don’t know, can’t read. What was once promised to be as solid land or something like it is all pools and shoals, cold—but certainly not frozen. The air shimmers; there’s the distinct smell of bleach.
This place is haunted with a misplaced sense of familiarity. Perhaps it’s the cage, terrible as it might be. I welcome the order of its grid, which made it easier to know I had reached my intended destination. It looks more like my map.
This, I was told, is the last oasis.
There are people here, just as real as the places shown on my map: bare images. I crumple the thin paper of my useless guide and toss it into the water. It’s been so long since I’ve spoken with anyone and these flat figures promise no better conversation than the ones I’ve been having with myself.
Each picture always precisely what it isn’t, a ghostly voice tells me, they show only the gap between what they are and what they remember. The map floats, a sodden ball bobbing in the crystalline sea. I consider fishing it out but the threat of witnessing my reflection is too unnerving. I ask the ghost to show itself, and it just asks me what it looks like. “This is why nobody likes a ghost!” I feel like screaming, though I’d rather not alienate my lone companion here so soon.
I’ve forgotten the reason I came to this place. Something about beginnings. Perhaps these people are my parents. With no photographs of them, their appearance remains irretrievable to my travel-weary mind.
The ghost returns. All pictures gave birth to you, it incants. Each picture is your parent.
I’m unconvinced.
My journey’s been wandering and uncertain—and I am hungry. The water is clear. A rarity now, but bad news, because I was hoping for a fish or two. Even some seaweed might do, though plants have been scarce underwater for many years in these acidified climes.
I shuffle around in search of sustenance and on a table I see what may be a plate prepared for me. Pictures remain their own truth, the ghost lies again as I dig my grubby fingers into flat surface and come up unsatisfied, unfed.
I need to rest. I find a spot of earth that looks soft and tug my threadbare jacket down, stretching it beneath me as much as I can in order to form a kind of half-seat to protect me from the ground’s bitter winter bite. The horizon plays expansively as I watch its generous endlessness. Colors enliven it, but none which I know the names for. I can’t tell if this makes them more real or less. Images dance and sounds swell. It’s like I’m witnessing somebody else’s memories, forever on a loop. No tide comes in, no tide goes out.
The ghost tells me that my seeing has rendered all things gone, doomed to recede unceasingly into the trap of representation. This seems true, but I’m so tired, so starving, so willing to believe anything. The horizon tells its story again, again, again, again. I see hands, legs, distorted glimpses of faces; hear voices laugh and murmur. Maybe these people were me or my lovers or my family or my friends. I am thankful that cameras were forgotten long ago, and my memories with them. I am thankful to be a ghost now, too."
Exhibition text by Drew Zeiba
Solo exhibition at OTOT Studios, Cincinnati, OH - 2019
Solarsteading in Marielandia is a speculative post-collapse worldbuild taking place in the 2080's in the bustling urban metropolis of Marielandia, West Antarctica. The installation is comprised of artifacts from the SIM university, as well as excerpts from a screenplay of the same name that features two female protagonists on their way to Marielandia from Detroit as the Midwest is being rewarded. This work offers a glimpse into one possible near-future geopolitical scenario; wherein hemispheric stacks have become increasingly polarized, advertising reflects a new widespread solar punk ethos, and humans occupy an era of regrowth in a post-scarcity world.
Solo Exhibition at the Laverne Krause Gallery, Eugene, OR - 2019
We use silicon, but what if we used stone again?
Verum Pos Umbra is a new mythology of existing in the 21st century that borrow from the rituals, proclivities, and fictions of prehistoric proto-humans to forge a deeper level of truth and meaning in our everyday lives. Truth can appear anywhere: in fossilized bones, faraway galaxies, statistics, or even experiences. Though ultimately, truth is a narrowly-arrived at category of understanding the world that relies on current cultural discourse and can be continually manipulated by politics, science, and the theories and individuals that understand and justify them.
Going forward, we must embrace our evolutionary past. We are, and have always been, a post-truth species. Our emergence as the most dominant animal on the planet owes itself in large part to our ability to believe in gods, myths, countries, and corporations that exist solely in the intersubjective realm. Fiction, in fact, is as significant a tool in the human arsenal as the stone axe, wheel, steam engine, and computer.
Verum Post Umbra is about harnessing the power of our deep ancestry and reclaiming a togetherness that we no longer experience.
We must de-narrate ourselves as individuals and find a new role in the cosmic journey.
Collaborative Solo Exhibition with Ian Anderson at The Neon Heater Gallery, Findlay, OH - 2017
I. 391 million years ago, a mollusk opens its shell to great the warm, rising young sun. It begins the new day by nourishing itself with algae on the salty ocean floor. It feeds and consumes; always in pursuit of new and more plentiful horizons.
II. Eventually, moments of glacial melting, sea level rises, drought, swampy expanses, and eventual land masses define the area that the mollusk once thrived. Their shells dried up, along with the coral plains, the trilobites, and the rest of the once dominant sea life, becoming forever preserved in their new home of stone and sediment.
III. Hundreds of millions of years later, while foraging for fossils along the Ohio River Valley, the mollusk lies in its fossilized state somewhere just below the mud on a creekbed in the distance. The iridescence on the surface of its shell still gleams slightly in the light of the sun. The pursuit of the unknown draws them to the banks of the water where they reach down to grab the rock and brush off the ancient dirt. Admiring the relief for its transcendental beauty, a diminished sense of self washes over them; time itself becomes obscured.
IV. All of the unknowable forces that led them to this place at this time converged at once; they shaped this moment beyond any imaginable comprehension. All the ever was, everything that is, and all that ever will be can be felt in this lingering instant of deep time. Outside of perception and outside of ourselves, it remains.
i. A new world of connections in networks far more complex begins to breed; constantly replicating itself for future survival. Its mission is to make us obsolete, to overcome our agency for a deeper sense of becoming. Our entanglements of self hold us back in this strange landscape, we are unable to adapt.
ii. The sun begins to set and dusk settles in. Our experiences have become clouded by the systems we once endured; we have yet to harness our energy in this precarious moment of change. It lowers still despite our unpreparedness. Everything comes down to this; to one fold in space, one moment in time, one last breath . . .
iii. In the dark of night, let the tide wash over you on the banks of the calcarine fissure.
Group exhibition at the Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH - 2017 with Ian Anderson, Justin Hodges, Future Retrieval, Jordan Tate, and Casey James Wilson.
The Wired presents physical manifestations of digital content that breaks down the perceived boundary between the corporeal world and the Internet. Each piece contains a kinetic facet - from circulating water, to video, to virtual reality, underscoring the movement of images, objects, and information humans seek to balance in daily, mediated existence.
Group exhibition at the Kunsthalle Am Hamburger Platz, Berlin, Germany