Iowa-born, I attended art school at the University of Iowa before moving to Oakland, CA, for graduate school at Mills College. I now live and work in San Francisco.
I've participated in exhibitions at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Root Division, the Santa Clara Museum of Art, and the School For Poetic Computation in NYC. Highlights from my creative career include participating in a Creative Code Fellowship sponsored by Gray Area and Stamen in San Francisco, publishing a graphic novel of short stories about Senegal, Mali, and Ethiopia travels, and being a resident at 72u / 72 and Sunny in Los Angeles. In addition, I was an Artist's Fellowship Awardee at the Eyeo Festival. I recently interviewed on the Bantam Tools podcast (The Edge), and participated in art fairs in Seattle, Chicago, and Houston. My recent sculptural work is available through San Francisco's Open-Editions, and I currently have work on display in the Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon University.
My job heavily informs my work as a technology and industrial design instructor in the Technical Arts department at Lick-Wilmerding High School. At LWHS I developed the Electronics and Circuits program and was instrumental in developing many of the institution’s digital fabrication abilities. I'm committed to anti-racist personal and educational practices that de-center white dominant culture. I'm a repeat attendee of the White Privilege Conference and a regular attendee of our school's "Anti-Racist White Affinity" meetings.
Much of my varied studio practice gravitates towards 3D work that employs abstract sculpture, craft, and industrial design elements. I look for quirky and poetic ways to combine dissident themes like meditation, malfunction, spirituality, inefficiency, political data, danger, and asymmetry into carefully crafted, often electronic, objects. My illuminated objects blend the perfection of digital manufacturing with the unpredictable beauty of organic materials. This material junction is a venture to integrate the new-ish possibilities of machine additive and subtractive sculpting with the warmth of handcrafted wood and electronic elements. They begin as iterative sketches, often intuitively, over several hours, days, or weeks. As ideas develop, each design element becomes sculpturally intertwined through a process of 3D modeling, prototyping parts, and circuit engineering. The result is organic and emphasizes personality in a way intended to nurture their art objectness. However, they are usually also functional, providing light, though the participant does not always have control over the color or color change interval.
The shapes are often simplified, quirky abstractions of analog objects. King of Fruits, for example, inspired by the Southeast Asian durian, is a handheld sculpture that illuminates bulging protrusions with a calm and changing array of LED colors. Modern Digestion is a nod to the intestinal tract and all the microbiota working miraculously to perpetually break down, absorb, or pass the extraordinary collection of natural, synthetic, planned, and unintended items we put down our esophagus. Magic Stone visually suggests an energy field emanating from CNC-cut walnut. With textures and details reduced, each piece emphasizes some of the most seductive details from the object of inspiration. These pieces are intimately small, most are freestanding, and a few can be unplugged to operate on rechargeable batteries.
I've also worked on several projects that might first be experienced as decorative but change or expose data intended to feel surprising or thought-provoking. For example, an Eink display that uses the language of comics to tell you about the air quality, a recalled children's unicorn boot that lets you know products that the Consumer Product Safety Commission is recalling, and a planter that tells you what bills Congress is passing. Each of these projects is practical and might work in any living room or home office, yet each is provocative and may lead to unexpected conversation. They are both decorative and political.
Contact me if you want to connect!