The Great Escape or Nowhere Fast, 2011-2012

This body of work was completed during and just after my MFA at the California College of Fine Arts. I was exploring where fantasy meets reality, illusion, and a sense of always needing to find a way out.

I have become claustrophobic. Once, tearing my head through the tight enclosure of a small tent, in the pre-dawn morning to gasp for breath. More than once, counting the fish on the painted ceiling above the MRI machine. I have lay in multiple times. In a crowd, panic simmers and roils up from my feet to the top of my head. I need to know there is a way out.

I am constantly making pieces about the intention to escape but the inability to actually fulfill that goal. The pieces propose impossible escapes: the 50 pound steel, ladder, or the train track headed towards a mirror, rather than a hole in the wall.

The Great Escape (or Nowhere Fast)

(Detail)

23’ x 5’ x 1’, Poplar,ebony glass mirror, 2012

The Great Escape (or Nowhere Fast)

23’ x 5’ x 1’, Poplar,ebony glass mirror, 2012

Hand made from poplar, this train track tapers from double to half scale over 22 feet forcing perspective. It culminates in a mirrored glass dark black tunnel, creating the illusion of an endless void. Existing between Wile E Coyote and Anish Kapoor, this piece draws on a history of the metaphysical within the everyday.

The Great Escape (or Nowhere Fast)

(detail)

Emergency Escape Ladder

18” x 12” x 36” x 50 lbs, Etched, forged, welded steel, nylon rope, 2012

Here, steel is camouflaging as wooden 2 x 4’s strung together rendering the easy-escape impossible. This emergency ladder weighs 50 lbs and might act more like an anchor than an alternate route. Here again, I play with ideas of illusion, material and escape.

Can You See Me Now?

90” x 30” x 48”, Birch plywood, latex paint, 2012

In the 1930s the US navy employed a camouflage technique called Razzle Dazzle to hide warships in plain sight. It consisted of colliding black and white stripe patterns to confuse the enemy of the ship’s form. Here, a cloud is having an all-over identity crisis: first, it is pulled from the sky, next, made into 2-dimensional planes, and lastly trying to blend in by inadvertently drawing more attention.

Raft: The Artist's Weight in Floatation Device

45” x 36” x 16” x 130 lbs, Solid cast plaster, MDF, paint, 2012

How do I quantify the feeling of being stuck in one place? This object appears inflated and light. Yet at the cross-section one can see its solid materiality. The cross-section indicates an amputation, the truncated raft. Its size was determined by my personal body weight. Rather than lifting that weight to safety, it becomes an earthbound counterweight into real life.

Thunder

steel, poplar, velvet pillow, microphone + stand, 2012