I am from Western Pennsylvania. Growing up there in the 1990’s profoundly shaped what I find visually and conceptually compelling. It was a boom time for much of America, but in and around Pittsburgh industries, labor unions, and communities were being hollowed out. My work often takes inspiration from that region. While I am thinking about cultural phenomena present in most, if not all, of America, Western Pennsylvania and the Rust Belt as a whole, are often the lens through which I examine them. The relationship between geography, the built environment, economies, and culture are central themes in my work. I emphasize these connections by referencing areas with histories of urban redevelopment, economic segregation, natural resource extraction, and subsidized suburban development.
I have a particular interest in the translation errors and systemic breakdowns that occur when filtering imagery between digital and analog production methods. I use publicly available GIS spatial data from the US Census Bureau. It is a vast trove of the federal government’s vector files and spreadsheets representing any geographic, political, or demographic information one could dream of. I manipulate the data so that only certain things are shown and then filter it through the laser cutter, vinyl cutter, copper, steel, book board, printing press and paper. The use of technology in my process has changed the way I think about my work and it became just as much about the breakdown in the systems I use to create it as it is about the systemic breakdown represented in the data I reference.
Printmaking is my preffered medium because of its history of reproduction, appropriation, and dissemination. It allows me to both create and appropriate didactic forms. Using printmaking processes I take specific data, chew it up, filter it, to make it more and more opaque what data is being referenced and what conclusions are being drawn. Context and process are more important than conclusions. My work is looking for answers but ends up being more comfortable with questions. It is a warning against certainty and trust in systems, a call to bring a skeptical eye to neat and tidy solutions, and an invitation to collectively question the culture. If, as Camus suggests, “beginning to think is beginning to be undermined,” then my work is designed to undermine itself in order to continue to build understanding.