Installation (glass, steel, vinyl, hardware, rainwater, sapwood, signage), 2019. I harvested rainwater from the roof of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, filtered it through a piece of pine wood, and offered it to the public, along with a text complicating the proposition of drinking it.
THE TREE SPA FOR URBAN FOREST HEALING uses the steam generated as a byproduct of the maple syrup evaporation process to power a communal steam room. Participants take the healing waters of the trees and discuss important matters affecting our communities, in the relaxing social space of a steamroom, while drinking tree juice from the maple trees growing nearby. The Tree Spa is based in Keney Park, in the North End of Hartford, Connecticut, a neighborhood with a poverty rate near 50%.
I performed a 26 mile walk, which I have mapped out here, circumambulating nine times counter-clockwise around the Mission Church in the present-day Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, the traditional homeland of the Massachusett people.
I built a small weatherproofed shed and installed it in New Haven as part of A Lot in Our Lives in 2007. I made custom clapboards for the sides, little round windows, and a miniature orange door, and I put asphalt roofing on it. It was pretty sturdy.
Ted Efremoff organized a show called Insite/Out in June 2012 at Artspace, New Haven, CT. For two weeks I lived and worked in the gallery along with artists James Sham, James Holland, Rebecca Parker, and Ariana Jacob. For me, this was a return to a neighborhood in which I had previously done a major project (A Lot in Our Lives). I had also grown up going to punk shows around the corner at a club called the Tune Inn that is no longer around. The neighborhood has been gentrifying and developing a lot since I’ve known it, due to its proximity to Yale and the downtown New Haven Business Improvement District.
This was a project I organized with Ted Efremoff. We built this boat in Willimantic, Connecticut, in three weeks. It is a wooden lapstrake canoe with a canvas sail. It was built with the help and participation of about 100 people from the local area.
Cloud City is an imagined utopia somewhere out there… A collaboration with Huong Ngo and numerous participants…
I’ve been out riding my tricycle a lot. I found it back in 2004. It was in pieces. I fixed it up, added some bells and whistles, and started riding. I like it, it gets me moving. Doing it. You know, getting into it, active.
Sam Ekwurtzel and I made a sauna by the lake at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007.
This project in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, ran April through September of 2007. It consisted of a variety of activities centered around a public space called The Lot, sponsored by Artspace. I worked in collaboration with various people around the city who have some relationship to the space, to develop interactive projects to place there.
In 2005, I worked 40 hours a week at a museum for five weeks, tending to a film I had installed, talking to people about the film and whatever else came up, playing music, writing, making prints, etc.
This was a banner drop I did on a parking garage in 2003, trying to create a blank, neutral, unspecified, and therefore disturbing message. I was thinking about and documenting the way American flags were being displayed on overpasses, construction sites, homes, and gas stations around that time, as the Terror War was getting going after 9/11/01. I made a short super 8 film about it. This action of hanging the banner was an attempt to complicate the conversations that were going on, which seemed to be all about choosing sides. The phrase “These Colors Don’t Run” has been used as a patriotic slogan for many years, in reference to national integrity and pride as embodied in an enduring, bright flag. My flag was colorless, blank, white on white.
One time I custom made a couple of signs for an empty sign post that had been sitting there for years with nothing on it. It was in front of the human resources building at the University of Connecticut, and across the street from a prison. The signs sparked some discussion among university employees through an interesting misreading and coincidence of timing. It was placed on a Friday, one week after Thanksgiving. The previous week university staff had been given the day immediately after the holiday (Friday) off work, for the first time ever. So people were worried that the phrase “Today is a Work Day” might seem like a (rather absurd) authoritative admonishment to employees, something along the lines of, “You had last Friday off but that doesn’t mean you have every Friday off, make sure you are at work today.” My signs were removed and eventually, through my having drawn attention to it, so was the signpost.
This was the first public action I ever organized, back in 2000, and it has stayed with me as an example of a successful project and influenced a lot of the other things I’ve done since. I made this wooden machine out of shipping crates and cable spools with a support frame. A group of friends and I pushed it around disrupting traffic, and then rode it down a big hill. There were no brakes to speak of, so we were worried about hitting something or somebody, but in the end it was fine, and actually that was a little disappointing!