STATEMENT

My collages, digital drawings, recycled paper and coroplast installations, stem from an investigation into consumer desires to purchase an organized lifestyle. Using catalogue glossies from Crate & Barrel, Ikea, Pottery Barn, and others, I create a hybrid-form of organization that speaks about the many tastes and design influences surrounding our consumer culture. My research focuses on furniture that functions solely as storage; it contains one’s belongings as it continues to perpetuate a want of more. I am intrigued by such a device’s ability to eliminate an accumulation of belongings into one unified object and thus the accumulation’s ability to live under a minimal guise of solidarity.

I am designing hybrid storage systems- modular pieces that grow in response to collection, yet strive to minimize such expansion. This dichotomy is significant in my work: an ever-growing accumulation versus a sincere want for containment and minimization of such. Currently, my digital drawings are composed from a reused and recycled vocabulary of ready-made furniture pieces (cut and catalogued from similar contemporary sources). By utilizing digital applications I am able to stretch, contort and warp these otherwise singular pieces into copious and complex images of architecture and landscape that challenge our expectations of accumulation and minimization on a contemporary and socioeconomic scale.

That intersection- the convergence of disorder and order, accumulation and minimization, utopian ideals and realistic notions- then becomes the unstable subject of my installation works. I strive to build structures, landscapes, and objects of perfection, utilizing paper (once fresh- now recycled) as a primary source material. These utopian structures fall continuously short- at times resolving themselves as an exercise in futility- full of almosts and blurred absolutes. But much like my modernist predecessors the work begins and ends engaged in a sincere desire to learn perfection.