.where do you get your wood?
Everywhere. Wherever. I find it. I have made friends with the Parks Department, and also with Cliff and Art (seriously, those are their names), the arborists at Greenwood Cemetery. And, this being NYC, there is plenty of construction and woodshop debris for the taking.
.what makes you select one piece of wood over another? do you immediately see or understand how to use it?
There is an immediate attraction to each piece I use, but I can't always say what that is. It may be a certain grace, or at times a blunt fact presents itself. I am mostly attracted to wood without bark—naked wood—because it is more evocative of the body and closes the emotional and conceptual distance between object and viewer. But I don't want to be fetishistic about the selection process. I like the idea of encountering something not particularly special—rather ordinary, in fact—and then incorporating it into an idea. It is more the idea of wood, or even the idea of matter, that is important. As to whether I see a use for something immediately, I can't say. Maybe. Things go through so many permutations in my mind, and sometimes fragments sit around in my studio for years.
.do you make sketches before you begin working on a sculpture? once the process is underway, does the work change drastically? and if that happens, do you then go back to making sketches?
sometimes make sketches, but mostly as notes. I sketch as I go along to take the ideas with me or to investigate in a less labor-intensive way. Brink came together very quickly. The drawing happened in the sculpture, so there wasn't any need to make a sketch. Crack is purely sculptural in origin, whereas both of the two works titled A Perfect Solid grew out of the same idea and resulting sketches. One is more faithful to the sketches. The other, made with burnt wood, came about because I was drawing with charcoal for the first time in 20 years, and that chalky blackness seemed to demand another version of the piece. I had these discarded Christmas tree trunks and . . . At any rate, it helped push the idea of each sculpture being "a" as opposed to "the" perfect solid.
.why two works titled a perfect solid? what is a perfect solid?
There are two pieces with this title because to me perfection is not singular. Most mono's are pretty problematic . . . -theism, -gamy, -culture . . . I was thinking of highly idealized and perfected forms, archetypes that we play our realities against and which concomitantly inform our perception. In these two sculptures I used an unfolding regular dodecahedron. I like that the unfolding of this very satisfying form produces non-tessellating regular pentagons that evoke subatomic structures and chemical formulas. A dodecahedron is conceptually the last of the five Platonic solids, the one which, according to Plato, " . . . the gods used for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven." The other four represent the four elements—earth, water, air and fire. A dodecahedron represents the union of these elements, and has been thought to have mystical and alchemical powers. It is an idealized form symbolizing will or ideation. In my pluralist version of perfection, the Platonic solid is unfolded, but not nullified. We take the solidity of matter as a given, but it is only a perception, hardly a fact. The more we learn about the nature of matter, the more open and intangible it all seems. I wanted to make sculpture where the thing and the map of the thing exist simultaneously.
.the photo of the cemetery, Present, seems to be from another century. is it something you found?
There is a bit of time travel at work in this piece. I found the situation, not the photograph. I then created a picture within a picture because I felt that the image of the setting alone did not tell the whole story. By itself, the picture of the cemetery was about photography and had a nostalgic overtone. It even suggested the Twin Towers. I wanted to convey more, so I created the border and reshot the image as if I were presenting it as information. I think the scene serves as a metaphor for the complications we face in the 21st century. A couple of things interested me about it. First, that the person whose tomb it was—or perhaps that person's family—requested those trees be planted. And secondly, that almost a century later, after this person has been subsumed, literally incorporated into these trees, these new lives, someone decides to cut them down in order to save the monument, instead of moving the monument, protecting the trees, or letting both grow together. The whole scenario made me think about life and death, personal responsibility, implication, beauty and entropy.
.in comparison to these new works, your earlier works now appear a bit predetermined in the way that minimalist and conceptual art often seems didactic or to have an agenda. do you feel this new work is conceptually and formally looser and more open?
Formally yes, conceptually no, but that is up for debate. I have been trying to play up the abstract formal qualities of the work. I think Nursery and Tab are breakthrough pieces for me. My concerns moved more toward the spatial, the neurochemical, and the quantum—toward using an expanded referent . . . an action implied or an idea disrupted . . . My work used to be about nodes on the rhizome of consciousness—image/objects as minimalist nodes, if you will. Now my work incorporates pathways, vectors, actions and systems. Purely formal abstraction is tiresome after a short time, as is didactic conceptualism . . . so . . ? My work still has elements of the explication of an idea . . . but it's no longer just one idea.
.how and why do you play the literal, if not the actual, and the representational off abstraction?
What is not abstract? I saw Untitled (Diving Board) (1991) as an extremely abstract work. It just happened to be more about abstract thought than mere formalism. What could be more abstract than encountering a life-sized diving board fabricated completely from memory? It had the same degree of formal concerns as my new work, just a more reductive resolution. The recent work plays the blunt fact of certain materials off more abstracted versions of those materials—off the idea of those materials—in order to ask questions.
.using the rainbow palette—that's dangerously close to kitsch. odd that such heady sculpture uses primary colors. did it take a while to feel comfortable with that choice and do you have any second thoughts about it?
Use of the full spectrum is still a mainstay in scientific imagery to represent certain "truths." I always ask myself if those Hubble "photographs" are "real" unaltered representations of astronomical phenomena. Are they are any less manipulated than, say, Present? I doubt it. The rainbow has been co-opted by hippy and gay culture. It has also been used as kitsch. Like God, it has even been used to political ends. But the full spectrum allows the rapid transfer of information from object to viewer while avoiding issues of design and fashion. Good taste can be overrated. I love using the rainbow spectrum in the painting as a way of integrating or transitioning the holographic laminate into the stark facts of the other materials. So yes, it took a while to come to terms with using the full spectrum, and yes, I have second thoughts about everything.
.what about the dialogue between consciousness and perception intrigues you?
It is not the dialogue between them that intrigues me so much as their interdependence. Consciousness, awareness, how and what we *q
know," is irrevocably influenced by perception, and vice versa. Pure perception, while desirable, seems highly unlikely. But I could write about this for days and just barely scratch the surface. This is why I chose to make sculpture, to heighten the conversation between the observer and the observed without relying on an academic explanation . . . the grok factor. These ideas, dialectics, contradictions are all present at once. The thing and our consciousness of it are inseparable. I attempt to allow for as many possible readings while pretending toward a singular object.
.how about that slippage between nature and technology?
Talk about interdependence! I like this "slippage" term. "Phasing" is a good one too . . . Ideas about nature are usually highly mediated and romantic at best. Most people think their Google-powered, cookie-enabled e-mail from the Environmental Defense Action Fund is going to somehow save a polar bear. If you want to be more in touch with nature, take a walk. But don't forget your iPod and cell phone. We are always in Nature. How again is technology not natural? At the very least, it is an extension of our bodies in much the same way our limbs and graspy bits bring things to our brain and gut tube.
.while your work feels distilled and concentrated, it also seems to imply an expanse. do you ever have urges to make large installations or environmental works?
Absolutely. I can see architectural interventions using these materials, descriptions of spaces within actual spaces, reverberations, phases, versions. And I would love to find a material with similar qualities to this holographic laminate that could be used outdoors for long periods of time. Also I have imagined building the 1993 piece Lucky Pierre on a much larger scale in an outdoor setting.
.inuverse, the exhibition's title—what's that about?
It is another way of looking at things.
Switching "you" and "I" in "Universe."
Interiority . . . empathy . . .
All is within us and everywhere . . . cheesy but true . . .