These Days: Calendars and Connections

This presentation is an artist talk in which I show examples of work grounded in autobiography, counting, and the measurement of everyday life. My art practice functions within a social, political, historical, and philosophical continuum that negotiates questions of race, gender, and sexual identity. Subjects of inquiry that inform the work include body cycles, floor plans, quilt patterns, ancestor portraits, to-do lists, digital sound analysis, piano lessons, junk mail, and journal keeping. Embracing temporality, accumulation, and erasure, while creating systems based on personal data, are fundamental in my approach to art making. My work slips fluidly between two and three-dimensions. Works on paper in graphite or acrylic paint are generated by systems that measure time and imply space. A continuing series of large-scale, site-specific string installations are responses to architecture as monumental text. The string presents a visual lightness, balanced by the substantial physicality and scale of the work. There is always a specific time period in which the installations materialize, exist, and disappear, leaving only photographs and stories behind. Practical concerns of storage and shipping have generated sculptural works that serve functional purposes. Both parts of my practice rigorously consider questions of text as image, the relationship between text and code, what counts, how it’s counted, and who’s counting, while marking the passage of time from every conceivable angle. My process is one of making and unmaking, looking, waiting, and recognizing things that go unannounced and remain steady, continuous, and unremarkable on the surface, but hold magic over time.