Glass, light and drawing have been my primary preoccupations for many years. I combine LED technology with traditional art-making techniques, such as drawing, glass casting, and sandblasting. I utilize the technology of light as an expressive device, not an end itself. I have found that glass and light can enact a transformation, releasing the mind from its usual pathways and preconceptions, inviting stillness, reflection, and making the familiar new again.
Some of my work involves sandblasting images onto glass panels, which I edge-light with LEDs, and often program with color. I have created works of all sizes using these elements, including large scale installations, which I have placed, by invitation, in windows in Manhattan, where they have lit up the city streets for many months. It has given me great pleasure to celebrate, in this way, New York as a city of immigrants, and the 100th birthdays of the Manhattan Bridge and the NYPL.
Much of my work addresses the human urge to dominate nature, peoples, and cultures, and explores how art can enable perceptual shifts that elude the grasp of domination. My bullet pieces have been in shows addressing gun violence and war. I have created a glass-and-light memorial, The Drowning of the Cockle Pickers, to 24 undocumented Chinese workers, who drowned while picking cockles off the coast of England. I also created a video in which their names are recited. My drawing series, Without Title, depicts imaginary landscapes inspired by the names indigenous peoples gave their land prior to colonial invasions. These names describe specifics of the landscape – quite unlike the names superimposed by the invaders. To My Quick Ear employs the idea of swarms, and includes algorithms derived from bird flocking used in discovering landmines. These are combined with passages from Emily Dickinson’s work and Holocaust-themed translations of same by Paul Celan. Poems as swarms and landmines. Phonotaxis, refers to the story of an attempt, via AI, to facilitate a conversation between a robot and a group of crickets. The experiment’s results were ambiguous, like so much communication, so the hinged panels allow for multiple angles of vision. My most recent drawings are inspired by the ancient lighthouse, Pharos of Alexandria, ultimately destroyed by earthquakes. No one knows what it looked like or how it worked, so these are dreamlike meditations on the struggle between the power of light to illuminate and guide, and the fragility of the great structures of civilization. In current sculptural projects, I cast vintage oil cans in glass. I call the series Little Oil (and the large pieces