[Images of work can be found below the text]
It Was to be a Glittering City: This body of work truly began in 2016, though it evolved out of what I was doing before it, which was a short-lived series I think of as “My Miami“, as well as the work of my MFA Thesis, You Were Always There with Us. The carry-over was a continued use of symbolic form to represent people, ideas and concepts. The focus, however, is much more local, though still fictional. The entire series has its origin in a very short story that I wrote which is a fictionalized recollection from a future me about a dystopian, flooded, Miami-of-the-future. Key to the concept is a heavy nostalgia for what has been lost (what will yet be lost), and I was inspired, in terms of the poetics of the work, by the novella by Adolfo Bioy Casares called The Invention of Morel. All of that is discussed nicely in the post I wrote to announce the upcoming show featuring the majority of this body of work completed during 2016 and exhibited as a solo show at Under the Bridge art space in North Miami, which you can read here. Some work was also exhibited in the group show Florida Dreaming at FAU, rather than in my solo show at Under the Bridge; there is a post about that here.
Inevitable Developments: The works in Inevitable Developments are all monotypes–typically a mix of dark field, light field, and color viscosity. They’re usually made in series, and what they depict are landscapes that are fantastical, grim, apocalyptic, or which strain the boundary of our daily contemporary imaginary. They’re more emotionally evocative than the works in Future Construct, and less optimistic and nostalgic than the works in It Was to be a Glittering City–however, all three bodies of work are like siblings, or perhaps like different moods of the same person.
Future Construct: This body of work began as the 2020 re-iteration of IWtbAGC, developed initially for the A.I.M. Biennial 2020; you can read about that exhibition in this post.
I have continued to add works to these series, and they remain an ongoing series; they are, essentially, the same series–though one looks behind from the future, one looks to the future from the now, and one is like a series of uncontrollable visions from each perspective.
If you don’t want to read the linked posts to learn about why I use the concrete masonry block, or (less often) the barrel tile or balustrade, here are the reasons: I’m allowing construction materials to be stand-ins for people in this region, as well as the representational values of this region which contribute to the way we build, gentrify, over-build, and/or react to challenges from global heating, natural disaster, and man-made disaster (which includes out-of-control rent/housing costs).
Some–but not all–works from these series are below; they are presented with the newest works first, but without identifying which is part of which of the above three series.
