Self-Checkout

I've been thinking about the fleeting and often incongruous emotions that I experience while casually attending to the details of my life. These are moments of reflection that disrupt the seamlessness of my journey through the commercial corridors that make up so much of my concept of America. For example, a chance juxtaposition of objects might transform a dollar store into a repository of latent emotion, full of gifts and cleaning products. A pet store becomes a vast arena that promises nourishment and responsibility, a collision of biology and love. These boxy outlets are intoxicating. I find myself seduced by their offerings, queasy under their fluorescent lights, and thrilled when their unintended poetics stops me in my tracks.

I wonder how the objects that I encounter most, the ones that emerge from the unfathomable networks of global production, might not only satisfy my desire but in some way also cauterize my own emotional complexity. Is my collusion in these systems of exchange a necessary condition of contemporary life, or does it point to my own murky moral ambiguity? Is there room in this landscape for an individual maker of objects who is neither cynical nor nostalgic? Might sculpture establish an alternative encounter with the same objects and images, to destabilize what is familiar and create an experience that is similarly abundant and strange? My work attempts to weigh these questions simultaneously, holding them in a state of physical form that can be addressed only through the curious act of looking.

2009