conSTRUCTS | reSTRUCTURES
con: persuade (someone) to do or believe something, typically by use of a deception. “with” or “together”
STRUCT: to build
In July 2017, I began this body of work while in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. I became attuned to the disparate ideologies in the ‘Big Easy’ to those found in my hometown Kansas City, specifically regarding the ethics of place, history of commerce, and dynamics related to urban restoration. I found New Orleans to be a city collaged together because of displacement and generations of independent renovations.
To locate myself within this history, I began looking at aerial images of the city in hopes of better understanding the logic of civic choice-making and order that, from street-level, was obscured by layers of overgrowth. Google Earth helped me reduce the ornate Creole architecture to a modular, structural language that countered my observations with concrete precision.
In response, I began a series of décollaged photographs that investigated the act of extraction for perceptual effect. The works in the conSTRUCT and reSTRUCTURES Series are produced by folding architectonic paper sculptures and documenting them in arrangements that respond to observations of constructed spaces and rhythms within urban grids. Once captured and printed, the photographs are cut into and layered to define deceptive passages of fractured geometry, associating the work with the paralleled processes of building and rebuilding. The resulting images depict scenarios that closely mediate the nuances between site-specificity, abstraction, representation, fact, and fiction.
All works in the conSTRUCT and reSTRUCTURES Series’ are collaged, décollaged, and layered inkjet prints.
STRUCT: to build
In July 2017, I began this body of work while in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. I became attuned to the disparate ideologies in the ‘Big Easy’ to those found in my hometown Kansas City, specifically regarding the ethics of place, history of commerce, and dynamics related to urban restoration. I found New Orleans to be a city collaged together because of displacement and generations of independent renovations.
To locate myself within this history, I began looking at aerial images of the city in hopes of better understanding the logic of civic choice-making and order that, from street-level, was obscured by layers of overgrowth. Google Earth helped me reduce the ornate Creole architecture to a modular, structural language that countered my observations with concrete precision.
In response, I began a series of décollaged photographs that investigated the act of extraction for perceptual effect. The works in the conSTRUCT and reSTRUCTURES Series are produced by folding architectonic paper sculptures and documenting them in arrangements that respond to observations of constructed spaces and rhythms within urban grids. Once captured and printed, the photographs are cut into and layered to define deceptive passages of fractured geometry, associating the work with the paralleled processes of building and rebuilding. The resulting images depict scenarios that closely mediate the nuances between site-specificity, abstraction, representation, fact, and fiction.
All works in the conSTRUCT and reSTRUCTURES Series’ are collaged, décollaged, and layered inkjet prints.
conSTRUCT 18, 34.75”x45”
conSTRUCT 20, 34.75”x45”
conSTRUCT 21, 34.75”x45”
conSTRUCT 15, 34.75”x45”
conSTRUCT 13, 34.75”x45”
conSTRUCT 17, 34.75”x45”
conSTRUCT 19, 34”x45”
reSTRUCTURES (Big Easy II), 57”x36.25”
reSTRUCTURES (Big Easy I), 57”x36.25”
reSTRUCTURES (Big Easy I and II), artist-made frames 
reSTRUCTURES (Tremé I and Bayou St. John I), 80”x53.75” 
reSTRUCTURES (Bayou St. John I), 28”x53.75”
reSTRUCTURES (Mid-City Limits), 30”x 45”
Open Plan, installation view, HAW Contemporary