Object of Penultimate Purpose: Home Sculpture

Born in 1986 and raised in rural Pennsylvania, I'm connected to and constantly inspired by my area's backwoods culture, my family's Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, and the hereditary tendency toward hoarding . Much of my time is spent traipsing through the woods finding abandonded houses to make my own and objects to collect. My works evidence the allure of that which has been left to ruin and seems meant to be forgotten. They are made out of a need to reconcile memory and inventive musings with the often uncomfortable reality of my existence in the present. The resultant work serves to document my illicit explorations of abandoned properties in the Appalachian woods of Pennsylvania while illustrating a psychological search for home or place. While delving into each long-vacant, dilapidated building, I am spurred on by curiosity and excesses of imagination, but I also feel an innate connection to these scenes of desolation which might be analyzed as a longing to belong - either in some place or in an undefined moment of time past. Installation works allow me explore themes of belonging, home, and family in a way that is more direct and personally revealing, while the images I create on paper or canvas address these concerns more universally. In each wall installation, photograph, painting, or print, an aesthetic of accessibility is maintained, and balanced with ambiguity. The installations combine my two-dimensional work with grimy found-objects I have collected from the scenes of lives let go. The images I make -through painting or prints that I develop after my backwoods investigations or the photographs I take during- I often compose as pleasantly picturesque, though closer inspection reveals the depiction as sadly nostalgic and the desolate setting as somewhat uncanny. Individual images are presented without the accompaniment of explanatory information, and in the wall installations the relationship between the two- and three-dimensional components is left unelaborated. The titles I add to each work are words that point toward but never define the experience of discovery and my artistic intentions within the work. Through this body of work, I am able to convey something of my experience while letting the viewer determine the relationships within the work and establish his or her own to it.