I am an artist who primarily works within topically focused projects. Each project has come out of questions that emerge from my attempts to understand perceived contradictions in the world around me.  For the past 10 years I have been engaged with various questions around the nature of violence as part of a human condition. In 2011, I began a ceramics project despite having no experience with the medium. I had just completed an intensive three-year project in photography that was looking at the origins of human violence. In the series “The Four Year War at Gombe”, I reference Jane Goodall’s research on primate aggression to construct a parallel narrative of our own history of warfare. Throughout the making of that work and the research I was doing, I found myself becoming increasingly concerned about an endless state of war and what that said about human nature. The U.S. was in the middle of the war in Iraq, that would quickly engulf much of the Middle East. I began this ceramic work as a means of trying to understand something that was beyond my experience. It started from a place of empathy   

Recent Projects.

2010-2013

The Four Year War at Gombe, is an epic photographic series installed in chapter like groupings. The series is based on Jane Goodall's discovery that chimpanzees, like us, carry grudges, defend their territory and wage war. The series follows Goodall's accounts of a troop that lived peaceably together for many years before splitting into two communities. Over a period of four years, half of the original group hunted down and killed all of the former members of their troop. It seems that like us, the bloodiest feuds and civil wars are always waged against those whom we have the closest ties to.  Goodall wrote about chimpanzee violence and saw our selves in them, both in our ability to co-operate as well as having the same kind of strategic thinking that goes into planned warfare.

2013- Ceramic present

While the subject of this work focuses on the destruction caused by war, specifically, the damage that civilians endure, it is equally impossible to ignore how strange and interesting these images of destroyed cities are. Modernity’s presence can be seen in the gridded structures revealed by the destruction as well as the directional movements within the collapses themselves. A feeling of the uncanny is present in the juxtaposition of buildings that feel familiar, yet now strange in their mutilated forms. The experience is further complicated as looking becomes entangled in remembered images from film, video games and other fictions, not to mention the engagement we might have with the formal language of abstraction while contemplating these destroyed cities. The uncomfortablness we experience navigating these thoughts, frames a perspective that is from a distance, and perhaps American. As concerned as we may be, we are safely looking from here and not there.

My work has been exhibited at Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota,The Chicago Cultural Center, Crystal Bridges Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Elmhurst Art Museum, Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside, California, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, Illinois, Galerie Wit, Wageningen, Netherlands, Rocket Gallery, London, England, The Drawing Center,  New York City, New York. My work has been written about in Art In America, Flash Art, Chicago Tribune, Art Papers, Chicago Magazine, New Art Examiner. Awards include The Illinois Arts Council, Jerome Foundation,  Art & Technology Residency; Wexner Museum, Artists Residency; Wild Animal Park. Artist Residency: Krems, Ausrtia