My first solo exhibition at Women & Their Work Gallery in Austin used sculpture, photographs, performance and installation to present a large body of work that explores power, gender, healing, sexuality and transgression through organic materials and interactive experiences. I used my signature theatrical cosmology, dark humor, fetish objects and assemblage armor to create this world.

With the UrGear series, I transformed vintage sports equipment into shamanistic armor and weapons. After asking a selection of creative subjects from the greater Austin community to tell me about the hardest battles they have ever fought, I chose a combination of the UrGear for them to model. The resulting portrait sessions documented them performing with my sculptures and felt empowering, as they found places of peace and nobility. The transformations were noted in the bronze plaques on a large three-tiered trophy stand of sexual totems called The Spectral Arcane.

Addressing subthemes of desire, privacy and secrets, I made a silicone skin rug runner with veins called Swept Under that had a small rubber band ball of angst and secrets about me inside. Vanitas is an installation (with a performance on opening night) that used the idea of process and failure to show the vulnerable side of exhibiting. Lastly, Saint Grab, a quartet of black beeswax hands, came out from the wall in gestures of playful aggression. In the entryway, every visitor became an equal object of desire upon entering the show.

A book based on the UrGear and my subjects is in the works for 2017.

2014-2015

An ongoing series of large mural photographs, the Pharoah prints were originally created as guardians for a commissioned installation in Norway. I created garments, including a hood and a poncho that mimicked my own veined skin, and presented them as part of a documented performance. Balanced between repulsion and desire, the pieces are meant to pull reference points from the viewer (shroud, burka, sphinx, saints,marble statuary) but lead them into an indefinable realm of new understanding.

2012-2014

Following a residency at the Lademoen Kunstnerwerkstede in Trondheim, Norway in 2009, I was commissioned to return and build a site-specific temporary installation in a cathedral as part of this group exhibition. Commissioned by the Norwegian Arts Council, Movum Vitae was an installation of giant mobile comprised of objects from my artistic cosmology and hung kinetically in the apse of a cathedral. Reminiscent of the Norse Tree of Life, the sculpture displayed the fragility of balance between ideas and the burden of art as an end-product. The installation contained other pieces, such as The Ceremonist, a totemic staff with sound that served as evidence of a presence and action. Nostalgia Markers exhibited as a walking tour consisting of eight miniature monuments made from Cypress knees, latex and bronze plaques. Imbued with various thoughts or questions from my memories of the residency, they were staked into the ground and participants could follow a routed map to specific meaningful locales and thereby experience a taste of the inceptive process of an artist by walking in the literal footsteps of specific pieces of nostalgia. They were left there until they were stolen, discarded or defeated by natural elements.

2012

Sponsored by Co-Lab Projects and LowLives, I conducted an interactive performance at the Fusebox Hub in Austin, Texas. I tied an unsuspecting audience together in a string web, while manning a turntable with short-lived soundtracks from my own 45 records. The participants developed empathy for my pathetic, slapstick struggles as the web grew, eventually getting used to being bound by string. Two Olympic competition style judges “rated” my maneuvers with a scale number system that seemed to both intimidate and inspire my character. In the end, I cut the crowd free, ending the connection, and only then did they miss the phantom community of one another. The following are live stills from the evening.

2012