Public Interventions

Recently I have been placing myself in an awkward position. I have been exploring the precarious balance between practicing private art-making and interacting with the public at large. I seek to find an engagement with the world so that my work can begin to creep out of its narrow context and into people’s lives. In spite of (or perhaps because of) the challenges inherent in placing work outside of the art world, I want to make an art that can engage with a place or a person beyond the context of galleries and museums. This conviction derives from my own relationship with places: natural, grandiose, the city street, the industrial wasteland. These places have shaped me, they exert immense emotional force on me. As my art responds to this, I want the work to alter, not just reflect, the circumstances that inspired it.

Some of my work is a transaction with the natural processes of a site. The work is an action that arises out of observation and then participation in the systems of growth and erosion, or the movements of water and land. The human elements of a place have analogous processes, intermingled with the movements of soil or plants. Art actions make evident the choices people have made in shaping their environment. By planting a vegetable garden in an empty corporate planter, I intervene in the creation of the urban landscape. In other cases, the work, installed in a public space, is a tool for public dialogue and thus becomes a part of the reshaping of attitudes and beliefs. Throughout the work, I seek to create a vital engagement with people and a relevance to place, time, and situation.