I am an artist with an art history PhD. My practice investigates the mechanisms by which knowledge moves intergenerationally. That is, I consider written and visual material culture that has endured in the material world. In the tradition of scriptoria, I often create environments for contemplation by reproducing and reinterpreting this inherited visual and written matter. These environments are often built within existing spaces, particularly museums and galleries, which I transform through sculptural deployments of furniture, 35mm projector slides, beeswax, drawing, painting, handwriting, sound, corn husks, my body and other materials selected according to my ever-evolving rasquache sensibilities. I consider caves where the earliest human marks can still be consulted to be early scriptoria, sites dedicated to the reproduction and preservation of knowledge in visual form. My practice emerges from caves.
Artworks correspond with scholarly work, ensuring that my scholarship is constantly informed by the processes of making and exhibiting. Often, ideas are worked out with materials and performances in space first, before taking the form of conventional scholarship. Intensive historical and technical research threads through all phases of my studio production. I spend substantial time consulting archival resources and secondary texts as well as consulting materials experts at art supply and hardware stores (and gem shops and lumber yards and metal supply companies...). I believe art history is made by hand. My dissertation, a study of rasquache and minimalist sensibilities' co-production of Marfa, Texas, is a prime example; it first took the form of a large-scale multimedia, multi-artist installation and series of performance events. This project culminated in the form of a gallery exhibition at Co-Lab in Austin, Texas after 2 years of research and production. It was only in the five subsequent years that it became a written scholarly document. Make-then-write-then-make... is the core of my methodology. While I use a variety of materials in my work, my primary medium is the discipline of art history itself.
By incorporating and unabashedly quoting the words and images left by ancestors directly in much of my work, I conjure ghosts of intellectual and artistic predecessors. Audiences are invited to join me in communion with their presence. Through building places for study, close looking, and contemplation, I aim to provide audiences with an evocative place for considering the legacies we inherit. I build opportunities for communing with disincarnate ancestors, ranging from my own family to well-known artists and art historians.
IMAGE: Altered 35mm projector slide from a discarded art history lecture set