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Being a creature of habit, I have a bad habit of collecting ephemera. A recent move across the country made me realize the folly of my ways, but here are some shots I took while still living in Chicago that made me understand my vice for what it is. 

These were the last remaining pieces from ye ol’ studio, one piece from a hydrocal series I did that was destroyed all but the one tile in this picture. I still have the sword, but all of the condom plaster shapes and the geometric rocks have been lost to the ages. The keys I made for Alysia Kaplan, I was just proud of the work I’d done for her.

I threw away the weird tin can pipe that I’d bought at a garage sale, but I’ve managed to keep the crystal diamonds and all of the porcelain, especially the “porkin pigs”.

These are some of my favorite possessions from my now highly truncated toy collection. I was forced out of self flagellation to purge much of my collection, but a significant portion was able to come with me. All the more pieces for the Nick Jones collection, which I’ll donate to some museum when I die.

This piece is three fold. In it’s first layer it is a metaphor for the sacrifices I had to make over the course of four years at SAIC. Secondly it was a resume’ of objects showcasing my skills as an artist; being able to blend Visual Communication, with sculptural ceramic objects was the culminating thesis of my time at SAIC. Thirdly it was my first foray into working with a partner on a group piece. My friend Jordan Stefanelli created a motion sensing sound piece which was on the wall adjacent my sculptural piece. The Buffalo was constructed out of black painters plastic and aluminum blanket material, hand cut with an x-acto and inflated with a sunbeam fan. Inside the piece was a diorama of ceramic sculpture from my Greenman series pieces. The table was constructed of baltic birch which I had cut, white-washed, and then burnished aluminum duct tape on the edging to finish it. All of the projected imagery are designs I created in Adobe Illustrator, and then placed in a Flash animation, which would randomly cover the space in symbolism.

In this series of pieces I was trying to work much more of the moment, or intuitive. I began with a high firing, bone white porcelain body and threw these pieces fast and dirty. I had been developing an idea utilizing fishnet stockings as a stencil that could be dynamically altered while applying glaze. This entire body of work was using only one recipe of Majolica (low fire cone 04 Tin Glaze) with 5% additives of mason stains for colorant. I wanted to express how bizarre existing in our reality truly is when you see it from a wider spectrum, or with a heightened sense of perception. The fishnet stocking patterning was an analog for me to the space time continuum from which Einstein explains is the very “fabric” with which the Universe is made of. I very much believe this work was a direct result of my having been exposed to Existentialism in an adjacent class at the time. This is some of my favorite, yet most complicated work so far. 

The Greenman work began in it’s infancy as a way for me to generate work. I was having a deluge of ideas from one offs and readymades, but I was being urged by my peers and faculty to develop my own icons. Therefore after an extensive research period I began recontextualizing the Greenman motif which has been present in several civilizations in one form or another, ( i.e. Kerrounos, Wicker man, Pan, The Green Knight). For the most part the Greenman is a symbol of rebirth, and ancient solstice rituals that surround the concept of the the changing of the seasons. and I was trying to bring that energy into my work through quoting the motif.

These Vignettes were collections of pieces I was working on at the time that became so well balanced together. I consider them more thought experiments in aesthetic relationships rather than any focused concept. All of the porcelain objects were casts of various plastic objects, soda bottles, rubber doll heads, etc. The plaster objects were casts of toilet paper tubes and refuse from the plaster shop that I then cut geometrically on the band saw. My favorite aspect of this work was discovering new readymade molds from which to pull iconography. 

I did this piece as an entry into Lollapalooza’s Who Art Thou Exhibit. The piece was chosen by Perry Farrell and a committee to be on exhibit during the 2007 festival. This piece was made during a time when celebrity had brought about tragic ends for these two starlets, and I wanted to have a spiritual stand in available for them as they were either incarcerated or in mental hospitals at the time and unable to attend the festival. 

This was one of my favorite projects in any of my Visual Communications courses. My Professor, and life long friend Alysia Kaplan introduced me to screen printing with this cult printing method using a Japanese Gocco Press printer. This piece is entitled “It’s summer time, Kill your TV.”

This is a character from Junko Mizuno’s Pure Trance series. The objective of the assignment was to translate a photo of a real object, into a vector rendering using gradient mesh’s extensively in Adobe Illustrator.