Statement

I have always been interested in how people display their neuroses, how embarrassment is something we all have in common, triggered by our own personal histories. At the same time my own nervousness keeps things at a distance-seemingly remote, often times couched in metaphor. An example of this is how I arrange space, orchestrate intimacy, and turn the public into unknown performers. There is admittedly a starkness� to this approach, but I think of it as a perversion which accompanies my tendency towards voyeurism rather than malice.

Whatever the form, the work considers the relationship of the social/political world to the private psychological one. My approach is to combine humor and cynicism to zoom in and out of the conditions which organize us as a culture, thereby hoping to affect us as individuals. The adage of ‘what you do in public is different than what you do in the privacy of your own home’ explains how and why my interest in public space moves from the street to the institution to inside the domestic environment. I try to highlight and confuse the differences between these sites in an attempt to promote a social breakdown of content and context

My work falls somewhere between sculpture, architecture and design. Though trained in sculpture, since 1983 I have found it more interesting to think about the politics of need, desire, and circumstance, which has remained the focus of my practice. The work takes various forms and scale; I design public spaces, libraries, small architectural structures, live /work spaces, and bedrooms. I make furniture, not as ‘good design’ but rather as a way to isolate the body in its social environment. I think about how furniture can be used as a camera to isolate body actions and behaviors, and I look for the moment when the way people live at home is displaced into public view.

Leaving Home

The habits of domestic life are transposed onto the street. How we walk,talk,eat,relax is negotiated onto the scale of the public site. We leave our home and carry it like a backpack throughout the day. We take it with us to the street, the theater ,the subway ,the mall. We take our walls, chairs, libraries and vanities with us.

We put on a coat and think of it as a warm bath. We buy a newspaper to fit around us like a mobile home. We sit in a park and find the same seat as yesterday. We drink a coffee to make the public space our living room. We take a train to get under the covers of the book. We wear sunglasses to separate our room from another. We look in car windows to try to locate our reflection in a context. We cross the street and try to remember why we left home.

Nature

I grew up in New York City and am a fifth generation manhattan-ite . Because of this, nature had always been an abstract, considered “not bad if seen from a car”. I therefore regard nature  as something alien, to be looked at from a distance and treated as a specimen. On occasion I have used  ‘natural ‘elements in my work as a human substitute, a social divider or simply as an optimistic presence.  I feel that the animal kingdom, unlike that of us humans, is unmediated and not defined by the encyclopedic dictates of the pre-requisite pedigree, and therefore less complicated.  I consider the natural world as information  similar to a book , film or video. It is a material to be worked with—a material like any other.