Exhibited in Gallery No. 5 at Abel Contemporary Gallery in Stoughton, WI, 2021
Show Statement:
There is an unnamed presence—a spirit, a ghost, an essence—that exists across America. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, I became more aware of it. I found that this thing could inhabit a space as large as a burnt forest or as small as a splinter. I could feel it lurking around environments I engaged with while skateboarding in parking lots, walking through rural land, and driving across empty backroads. I became inspired by it and wanted to explore the potential of giving it body and mass. I started responding to places I could feel this essence by creating relics of human material that engaged and existed amongst an outdoor environment. The figures of my sculptures and installations were never quite human or non-human but rather somewhere in between. They embody forgotten material, disregarded land, and the whispering spirit of rural America. My exhibition, “the splinters in our hands,” are the bodies of the unnamed ghost of the American landscape.