My work explores an imaginary post-human landscape with roots in science fiction and environmental crisis.
The characters in my work most often take the shape of engorged daisies that appear more mycological than floral, suggesting a means of subterranean communication, and a broader interconnected network. Neighboring plant forms are an amalgamation of real and imagined botanicals that have undergone a hypothetical evolution in reaction to a changing world. Mysteriously backlit in vivid tones, each color cast is evocative of an unknown light source that might insinuate the presence of a second sun, a foreign moon, the heat or chill of a nearby chemical glow.
In developing my own pseudo-scientific imagining of the future forest floor, the study of fungi has provided endless inspiration to my practice. Fungi have survived four different extinction events. In the most devastating conditions, fungi have endured as environmental architects, charting the way forward for the subsistence of neighboring plant life by regenerating the soil and sharing nutrition through an underground mycelial network. Mushrooms have even been found growing in sites with high radioactivity and on a spacecraft traveling through space. Radiotrophic mushrooms were discovered growing inside the cooling waters of the nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, turning the water black.
I imagine the black plant forms in my drawings to have arisen from similarly inhospitable environments. Perhaps they have emerged from the Newtown Creek, an EPA Superfund site less than a half mile from my studio in Greenpoint. At the bottom of the Newtown Creek is a thick black sediment of petroleum, raw sewage, and other contaminants referred to as “black mayonnaise”. What if viable plant life were to evolve from that sludge? What if like some mushrooms have been proven to do, they digested heavy metals and consumed plastic waste?
Or, what if their coloration came from a mutated form of photosynthesis allowing plants to absorb all available wavelengths of light, rendering them black instead of green?
What if in light of extreme temperatures plants could melt back into a primordial ooze?
To capture the tangibility of these thought experiments, I begin my drawings and paintings by first constructing a small diorama model to inform the final piece’s composition and lighting structure. The sculptures I create to populate these fictitious landscapes are made from either compostable and recyclable materials like paper mache, cardboard, and paper, or transform non-recyclable discarded refuse like styrofoam and plastic film into armature for new creations. With each new diorama, elements of previous scenes are repurposed so that each new artwork has a relationship to the last, creating an immersive and expansive alternative world.
Through these speculative scenes, my work questions not only the positive and negative implications of humanity’s impact on nature, but the capacity for adaptation and resilience across all life forms. With humankind’s natural predilection towards fatalism and apocalyptic end-time predictions, these works are a reminder of nature’s cyclical metamorphosis and the seasonality of change.