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.
Woodcuts and wood engravings on paper, 36″ x 60″, edition of two, 2017.
This installation consists of a 5′ x 8′ print on paper, a collection of carved wooden block sculptures of various sizes, a set of chess pieces whittled from twigs, a dried common mullein plant, a representation of a monumental roadside religious pilgrimage site built by a distant cousin of mine, my grandmother’s drawing of a piece of driftwood, and the actual piece of driftwood.
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.
This is a work I made at the Center for Book Arts in 2012 when I was a resident artist there. It consists of thirty-six woodcuts and wood engravings from all six sides of six handmade type-high (0.918″) blocks of maple, with an original narrative text & list poem handset in lead Caslon Antique type, letterpress printed in seven colors on a paper booklet & fold-out broadside.
This is not just any old business card, but a parody of one, which opens out to an accordion-fold book with a very long, very irreverent list-poem of every job or identity construct I have ever had in my life.
This work imagines what it would be like to convene an inter-species committee about the monumental environmental crises we face on Earth. The acronym, C.R.I.E.R.S., stands for “the Committee for Relentless Inquiry into the Earth’s Regretful Situation.” Click on the image to view it bigger so you can read it.
In the winter of 2009-2010 I was working on how to collect Sycamore (London Plane) sap from all the street and park trees in New York, and boil it down for Sycamore syrup, which reportedly is like maple syrup, but a little more “mediocre.” I documented that project along with some other related thoughts and experiences in a work called We Common, published by ISCP in an exhibition catalog Out of the Blue, and online at the Center for Collective Wealth.
The Beeline Transit Map is a reimagining of the NYC subway map. It shows the routes that birds, bugs, and bees might take to get around the city, hopping from greenspace to greenspace, to point out how important those spaces are. Huong Ngo and I drew it by hand with watercolor and pencil.
This is an adventure I had with a giant pumpkin, in 2005. I was invited to make a site-specific performance art work for a halloween party, as a member of the Independent Performance Group, curated by Marina Abramovic. I carved the pumpkin into a house and lived inside of it for the duration of the party.
This book was printed at the UConn Printshop with Gus Mazzocca’s offset press in 2005. Offset and embosograf, staple bound pamphlet. Edition of 500. 4.25″ x 5.5″. This book was part of A Work of Art.
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.