A group of friends and I built out our studios together in an industrial building in the Bronx five-ish years ago. It’s grown and changed since then, I took over the adjoining studio next to mine over the pandemic when I no longer had access to the communal metal shop I had used for years. The timing made sense, I was starting to grow out of the previous metal shop, so now I essentially have two studio rooms, roughly the same size next to each other: one for metalwork and one for everything else.
A lot of tools and equipment are pretty essential to me. I don’t have a very mobile studio practice at all. The most essential tool is my tig welder followed closely by an angle grinder, which is a handheld tool I use to cut and grind metal. After that is probably my metal bender, it’s a kind of primitive looking tool that is anchored to the floor of my studio. It has this long arm coming out of it that, through a combination of leverage, different shaped dye, and brute force, it allows me to bend relatively thick metal rod with basically just my body weight, so without using electricity.
For a long time, it didn’t really. It was important to me not to need to depend on others to make what I make. I think a lot of interesting things can come from giving yourself those kinds of limitations but at a certain point it stopped making sense to try to be so self-sufficient. I’ve had part time studio assistants on and off over the years who mostly help with sanding and shaping some of the more repetitive metal components. Recently, I’ve started working more in glass which is inherently a very collaborative material because the process of glass blowing isn’t something that’s done alone. For Bulge I was bringing metal forms I made in my studio to a glass blowing workshop in Brooklyn where I was working with a glass blower and a team of 2-4 other people to blow glass into my metal structures.
Every sculpture is different, I really don’t have a set process. I usually come up with a vague idea that’s a combination of 3 or 4 existing shapes or forms often furniture, medical equipment, a clothing item or insect anatomy and I’ll bring printouts of those things into my metal shop and then I just kind of start bending and welding. That’s part of why I like working in metal so much; it’s a very forgiving material, meaning I can add and subtract material several times over relatively seamlessly, which allows me to rework things as I go.
Most of my work is the combination of two materials with opposing tactile qualities. It’s kind of a basic sculptural tool. I like to see the way these two materials react to one another. I hope it creates a kind of visceral sensation. That’s part of the reason I so often come back to tubular steel. There’s something about the familiarity most of us have with interacting with that material in the context of modernist and modernist-influenced furniture that allows you to know exactly what sensation with that material is like. I think about representing materials as they are in my work, meaning if something looks like it’s being stretched, squished, or sagged that’s because it’s actually what’s happening. Things are as they appear.
The pieces in Bulge are a mix of glass and silicone along with stainless steel. Glass is a newer material for me. I have been working in metal and silicone for a while now and glass for the last two years. I think of the glass in similar terms to the silicone in that you can see the way the glass is reacting to the metal. If it looks like the glass is expanding out through the stainless steel, it’s because it is. The main difference between the glass and silicone in the end is a difference in time. The silicone reacts to the steel and continues to react in the same way. Whereas with the glass, it reacts in its moment of making, and then after its cooled is essentially frozen in time in its earlier moment of reaction.
I hope that through the perceived softness of silicone, a material that has been engineered to often mimic the softness of a body, one can understand the feeling of the silicone being pushed, pinched, or held. When I make a sculpture that looks like a leather chair in cast silicone, because of the unique properties of the material, the silicone feels and looks more fleshy than the actual flesh of the leather. I don’t think of my sculptures as an exploration of the human body, they are something outside of the body, but they are still bodily.
Attraction and repulsion a very closely related, you can’t really have one without the other so it’s natural to me that they might coexist in the work. I like to create sculptures that explore moments of tension, both physically sensorily. There’s an underlying sensuality in the work, I often play with some of the sexier more curvaceous moments of design in our built environment and try to heighten them.
Most of my sculptures are a combination of several different preexisting objects or elements. Often the result is something with familiar elements that is still somewhat unrecognizable. This is essentially the uncanny.
While I’m familiar with the concept of the cyborg, the alien, transhuman, or sci-fi aesthetic in my work is more incidental than intentional. I hope that each sculpture I create is a kind of jumble of references. These science fiction-like forms or creatures are often the result of translating elements of the natural world into materials like steel and silicone. While I may be looking more at the Art Nouveau tradition of translating nature into metal, or the ancient practice of creating claw foot furniture in a contemporary context, translating these elements into steel, silicone, and glass definitely has science fiction associations.
I haven’t really thought about my work as Camp per se, although I see where you are coming from there. I am often interested in playing with aesthetic references that may be considered tasteful or distasteful depending on the context they are in. It’s one of the reasons I’ve repeatedly come back to the form of the chandelier- because in one context an ornate chandelier can be understood as highbrow, in another it’s lowbrow. I think because the aesthetic of my work it’s not really kitschy I think of it more as using the tools of the uncanny (re- and decontextualizing the familiar) to question the ways in which our designed environments reflect larger cultural systems of value.
I love London, I’m really excited to be showing work there but there are some things about showing work in a new city that are strange. I think a lot about the fact that sometimes when people see my work for the first time, it’s not really the first time because of the way images are circulated online and in documentation in general. I feel like so much of my work has to do with scale, and existing in relation to your body, which can get lost in an image so it’s cool to get to show sculptures to a new audience likely seeing my work for the first time in person.
When I can make a new body of work specifically for a solo show, I always start by thinking about the space it will be exhibited in. In the case of the historical MASSIMODECARLO London space with its domestic scale, ornate molding, chandeliers, fireplace, mirrors, and green wall color, the consideration of the space took on an even larger role in determining the work than usual. One of the first decisions I made when approaching the show was to carpet the space in a matching green tone to the existing gallery walls. I feel the carpet heightens the domestic feeling of the space while making the floor and walls the same color draws more attention to the space’s ornate white molding. I tried to take some sculptural ques from the shapes in the gallery’s molding as well and focused on making pieces that were a kind of strange version of the furniture that might belong in a similar space. I wanted to transform the gallery into a kind of surreal domestic jewelry box with the sculptures existing as furniture-like creatures in a strange, ornate, domestic world of their own.
I’ve always looked at design, and more specifically furniture for sculptural inspiration. It stems from a pretty basic thought process: that I understand and relate to objects through the experience of having a body. The objects that I most often find myself relating to are ones I have bodily interaction with furniture, gym equipment, handrails. Those familiar objects have always felt like a natural starting point. In making a sculpture, I’m usually attempting to combine multiple objects or references into one, creating something that is both physically familiar and not exactly placeable. There’s not a specific message I’m trying to get across as much as the idea that everything we make – including the objects and furniture around us – is a product of our culture, and therefore contains traces of our own underlying values.
I’m not really aiming for one specific reaction. None of my pieces are titled, and that’s in part because I don’t want the three or four things I’m playing with in any given sculpture to be the exact same references that someone else might see. My hope is to create something visually stimulating and potentially thought provoking that might get someone to view our built environment through a slightly shifted lens.
