pe·riph·er·al
Resin, porcelain, gold luster, fabric, found objects, street detritus. Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Cheltenham, PA, 2013; Charles Sumner Museum and Archives, Washington, DC, 2023.
Resin, porcelain, gold luster, fabric, found objects, street detritus. Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Cheltenham, PA, 2013; Charles Sumner Museum and Archives, Washington, DC, 2023.
pe·riph·er·al: of secondary or minor importance; marginal importance.
A small figure rests in a bed of resin with the remains of our small daily decisions.
Each day we make small choices. Overwhelmed when face-to-face with global issues — inundated with images too appalling to linger with — we move forward. About half the world lives in poverty. In the United States, approximately 15 million children — 21% of all children — live in poverty. We think poverty. We think other. And we continue to make small choices.
Each day. Real consequences. 7 billion people.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz describes how, faced with too many choices, people oversimplify, make poor decisions, or simply refuse to choose — doing nothing instead.
7 billion people. Making small choices. Or not.
of our own design
Porcelain, Resin, Vinyl.
Porcelain. Mili Dunn Weiss Gallery, Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Cheltenham, PA — Solo Exhibition, 2012; Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, NY — Invitational, 2014.
Porcelain, Resin, Vinyl.
Porcelain. Mili Dunn Weiss Gallery, Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Cheltenham, PA — Solo Exhibition, 2012; Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, NY — Invitational, 2014.
We live, we consume, and we see the results all around us. The repercussions reverberate far beyond our immediate view.
We live surrounded by real need, yet we confuse want with need. We live in excess and see its residue — on the streets, scarring nature, pervading our towns, falling hardest on those with the least.
At the end of the day, we live in a world of our own making. Surrounded by broken beauty. A world created — of our own design.
Diffusion
Porcelain, gold luster, gold leaf, found computer components, wire, video projection.
Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Cheltenham, PA, 2011; Arts Westchester, White Plains, NY, 2011 (eARTH Invitational).
Porcelain, gold luster, gold leaf, found computer components, wire, video projection.
Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Cheltenham, PA, 2011; Arts Westchester, White Plains, NY, 2011 (eARTH Invitational).
Right now, in developing countries across Ghana, rural China, and South Asia, children sift through our discarded iPods, computers, and e-waste — searching for small amounts of copper and gold among plastic, ceramic, and silicone. Women sit in clouds of chemicals, burning away plastics to recover what little value remains. The risks to their health, water supply, and futures are immeasurable. The United States is among the few developed nations where shipping e-waste abroad — from the numerous "recycling" centers where we trustingly deposit our old electronics — carries virtually no penalty.
In Diffusion, delicate fractured waifs of ceramic are fused to wire, tipped in copper and gold luster, and suspended in the environment. Shadowy images of children in toxic play are projected onto the ceramic and filtered onto the wall behind them. Viewers are invited to walk into the space — becoming part of the piece as the projection covers their bodies and their shadows join the wall, at once with and apart from the children sorting desperately through our discarded world.
Porcelain, gold luster, wire, electronic parts, video projection. Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, NY — MFA Thesis Exhibition, 2010.
Sitting in a train station in downtown Budapest, I look up. Large ceramic insulators hang between the power lines above the platform — beautiful, massive, and utterly invisible to the people moving beneath them. I sit and stare. These could be sculptures. They could be monuments to some long-forgotten political figure or war. Nobody sees them.
They are white noise on the visual platform we all share.
Spaces, objects, people — all become static in our visual landscape. We are focused on where we are going, who we are meeting, what is next. We forget to see the things around us. We forget that there is a world beyond our list, and that this world impacts us. Like two lines that never intersect, we become a continuous missed connection. We look but don't see. We listen but don't hear. Our peripheries become background noise.
We make assumptions based on information we never fully took in. Our ability to process is limited. Our perceptions become shadowed — and what we try to communicate to others is already filtered through that shadow.
The transmission of information is fraught with disconnection. Interruptions cross our realities. Meaning becomes confounded. And yet — it is precisely this interruption that creates the pause allowing us to connect.
At the core of all transmission — of resources, of information, of meaning — is the ceramic insulator: facilitating connectivity, moving what matters from one point to another. In this work, the insulator is revisited, reevaluated, and re-contextualized. Supported by projection and video, the installation invites the viewer to confront the object situationally — and in doing so, to confront their own capacity to notice.
