Installations

Flower Bud

March 2020

An installation of a larger-than-life 'flower bud' that a person can enter into, sit inside of and control the brightness of a colorful chandelier that reflects a kaleidoscope on foil walls. It represents the 'bright' potential for progress that lives inside all of us and through us as beings connected to the universe.

Created for the Life In Progress exhibition by AnySquared Projects at the Hairpin Arts Center

MELT + TOAST + DUNK

January 2019

These time-based, performative sculptures were created during my CORE residency at the Chicago Art Department in 2019. White bread, Oreos & cherry candies are nostalgic foods of American childhoods that were manufactured in Chicago. 
Together with the audience, we dunked the 400+ Oreo sculpture, toasted bread and slowly melted a cherry candy sculpture

Found Object Installations

2016 & 2019

Temporary assembly of objects found in my alley and an installation of found glass leaves left over from light manufacturing

The Longest Journey

2015

The longest journey is from our heart to our mind. This meditation spot was created for the Hearts & Minds all city collaborative art show at the Hairpin Arts Center

Warm Memory

2015

My intention with this installation was to create an experience for the audience that allowed them to feel the community networks and connections that anchor individuals to a neighborhood. Giving physicality to the invisible ties that bind and create our home within the community. 

The house-like structure was modeled to fit exactly in the pie-shaped corner of the space and its perspective.

40,000 linear feet of string was used to create the idea of a home that the audience could walk inside of and experience the shift of scale and perspective as they moved toward the nose of the building that looks directly out on to the Logan Square neighborhood.

Nebulous Connections

April 2013

Collaboration with Stacy Peterson and Pei San Ng at Art on Armitage. We explored the Golden Age, the era that we are just waking up to. It is a time of unity, harmony and prosperity.

This concept evolved from a trip to Creative Reuse Warehouse with the aim of constructing an art installation made of recycled materials. Using leftover industrial hardware and metal wires, the parts were woven together to create connections, building something bigger than the single item. The nebulous, cloud shapes are a visual representation of how people work together to create communities, social networks and how molecular structures build.

It is also a play on cloud computing which relies on the sharing of resources rather than storing information on local servers. A wholeness or oneness is created out of the individual pieces. 

Home Sweet Home

2014

This installation was censured by a developer created 'arts' organization that took over a now defunct local arts festival. It directly called out one of their board members who has evicted countless families from the Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago. 

People were actively being evicted from the apartments above my site-specific installation in one of the empty commercial spaces below. I used the opportunity to shed light on the situation. 

Artists are often used as tools for gentrification to gain exposure and create 'hot' neighborhood myths for developers to artificially inflate housing market prices and displace poor people.

Time & Big Bang

2010-2012

Theoretically, physicists say time started in our universe with the Big Bang.  Time is an element of our life, a constant variable within the equations we use every day.  We tick off the hours, minutes, days and choose how we want to spend time, make time, waste time and gain time.  The subject of time is an elusive one and the more you try to wrap your brain around it, the harder it tries to escape and confuse.

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In 2010, I acquired approximately 3,000 clock hands from someone who had recently purchased a clock factory and was cleaning out the old inventory.

Over two years, I create multiple iterations of site-specific installations with these clock hands at the Chicago Art Department and Hairpin Art Center. It never ceases to amaze me how interaction with an object and its meaning, symbolically or literally, creates a dialogue when put into sculptural form and that context creates further dialog with the audience.

House Home

2010-2014

I have moved approximately 29 times for mostly economic reasons. Photographically documenting my past dwellings and later recreating floor plans from memory was a fun project that took me on a journey to revisit each place and recall spatial memories connected to each one.  

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Each dwelling was a container in which my life’s events have played out. Good, bad, happy, bittersweet, devastating, elating.  I am grateful to all of the wonderful people who also shared these homes with me.

100 Cups of Tea

Cobargo, NSW, Australia 2005

The Old Butter Factory turned junk collector haven for Rowan Dixon was transformed by the many found objects for sale to local artists, engineers, and movie prop people. 

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I spent 3 weeks there reviving the place while visiting Australia and participating in WWOOF. We drank 100 cups of Tetley tea in that unforgettable time.