Es Un Paisaje Bonito

This is a piece that was shown recently at Red Space Gallery. This piece is made up of hundreds or pieces of kids artwork that has been given to make over the past year and a half that I have been doing youth out reach to under-served communities. The drawings and sculptures were cute up and re-worked to form a landscape. This piece is both a loving nod to the children that I have worked with and a comment on the way in which these children will shape the world that we live in.

I believe that in my lifetime we will see a dramatic shift in the way we live. Some people talk about apocalypse or something similar, but I see it more as an end of the world as the way we understand it now. I, of course, also believe that I will be able to survive it. I suppose that many people think this also, since there is quite a bit of complacency in the face of so much evidence.

Over the period of about the last year, I have been learning basic survival techniques in order to archive these processes for future me.
I have also been learning to use resources that constitute the new natural. Resources that can be found in an abundance and seem to be constantly renewing themselves.

This piece was inspired by the idea of concrete slabs as evil characters trying to kill the earth by stopping water from getting back into the water tables. Humans have gone under ground to evade them, and have started their own inverted civilization. It is shiny down there.

Pay Phone Revival Project

This is a piece that was done as part of the Pay Phone Revival Project, in which six installations were done by various artists on abandoned pay phone booths on the east-side of Austin.

This is one in a series of pieces which I have made using processes or skills that have been utilized by humans over thousands of years and which are in the process of being lost. Examples of this are growing our own food, building our homes, starting a fire, or raising animals, all of which we, for the most part in the western world, would have to begin learning all over again if our technological society were to fail us.

I have been doing this using trash which has become one of our most abundant resources. For these pieces I envision a world in which we as humans have had to return to an agrarian society, and must do so amongst the ruins of our current world. And what we have created, concrete and buildings and refuse, has become our new natural landscape. These future humans would be left to return to the old ways set amongst a new landscape.

This particular piece is approaching the pay phone booth as the center of a bean teepee. The wood and chicken wire will eventually become engulfed in bean vines and sprouts that can be picked and eaten by passers-by. The chicken wire has been made to form mountain and peaks and valleys, which acts to restore part of the landscape that has been lost here in the heart of the city.

I was also thinking a bit about the pay phone booth as a ruin. That inspired me to think of other empires that have fallen.

Updates to come as the beans grow.

This is a public piece that I did in collaboration with J Muzac and Christi Zangrilli as members or Austin Green Art. It is signage, seating, a tile mosaic, and a sculpture for Eastside Memorial Green Tech High School. Eastside Green Tech is a project based high school with an emphasis on learning green techniques, and so they wanted a green project. The mosaic is made from re-claimed pool tiles and the seating is made from re-claimed wood and old signs. The construction of the seating and mosaic was also done in collaboration with the awesome students of Eastside Green Tech.

This is a tale of adventure

This November I did a residency at Nes Artist Residency in Skagastrong, Iceland. Iceland is pretty amazing and I highly recommend it. Go there.


This will be mostly a picture blog, with a bit of a story




Iceland is covered in very small, low-lying foliage with not very many trees in most of the country. So to me Iceland looked as if it were covered in another miniature world. Like a cluster of very, very small trees in a small tree forest.



I recently did a piece based off of the book, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, by Doris Lessing. I won’t get into too many details about it, but it is a really interesting bit of feminist science fiction, although calling it feminist seems too limiting. I have since become very interested in women’s feminist and utopic science fiction. I love how they utilize the political power of using one’s imagination, and beside that, science fiction has pretty killer aesthetics.
Speaking of killer aesthetics, Skagastrond has an amazing landfill. I have been thinking a lot about sustainability as I had mentioned in earlier posts, and had recently made the decision to only use trash/recyclables/thrift store or repurposed items to make my work.
I had somehow come into possession of the book The 1983 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wollheim. In it, I came across the story Written in Water by Tanith Lee. It is a really interesting story about Jaina, the last woman on earth. Men fall out of the sky, presumably sent by an alien race, to help her re-populate the earth. Jaina basically says, hey I never wanted to have a kid, I don’t really trust the human race, and I am fine here by my lonesome. And do you think I want to die giving birth to your alien kids out here all by myself with no doctors? So she shoots him.
I was interested in the idea of the last woman on earth. I had never heard of anyone telling that story before. And I was interested in the idea of the world as essentially a continuance that alternates between nature and culture. Perhaps humans need to die back for a while so that nature can come back and regain some kind of equilibrium. Trees popping up through holes in the concrete and the like.

This piece is an abstract utility vehicle designed for Jaina to sew her crops, whatever those may be. In one point in the book Jaina’s new alien man begins to till and plant her garden. “But he would make her garden grow, oh yes.” This is obviously a metaphor for fertility, but I think it may also be about the need to re-fertilize the soil and the earth as well.

Here is the final piece along with a few details. The balls are covered in the fibers of the old fishing nets that I took apart.