HIC SVNT LEONE

HIC SVNT LEONES (Here Are Lions) was a mixed media installation that used steel, glass and gold as the primary materials. Cut, welded and rusted steel elements were utilized to reference industrial labor, the working class, and those unemployed through the relocation of manufacturing centers. The glass portion of the piece represented the middle-class, made possible and fueled by post World War II policy followed by a booming U.S. economy. The manufactured glass blocks echoed the middle class as a historically recent construction now in a state of erosion. Gold was used to represent the uppermost echelon of American wealth and power. Its display speaks not only to the care and support, political and otherwise, required to preserve this wealth, but also to its social containment and isolation within the larger whole.  

RSVP

RSVP considered the idea of access, or its lack, which is inextricably bound to the privatization of public enterprise. For the duration of the performance, viewers could not visually or physically participate in the event, which privately took place in public space behind an eight-foot wall with no clear means of access. Although mere feet from the performance itself, the viewers were visually prohibited from fully experiencing its pleasures. They could only hear the laughter, conversation and music, and smell the food being enjoyed by those invited to attend.

Collateral Damage II

Collateral Damage II addressed the longing to return home by those displaced during the most recent housing crisis. Discarded house keys survive as visual artifacts of homes and lives built by the pursuit of, and enduring faith in the structural integrity of the American Dream. Like coins in a fountain, the keys still function for many as bittersweet reminders of a former reality that exists now only as a dream both remembered and pursued. The total number of homes lost due to the recession and its aftershocks  exceeded 18 million by year-end 2013. Each key in this fountain represents approximately 15,650 homes lost in the U.S. since 2005.