In this ongoing project, I meticulously grow borax crystals on my deceased father's cherished antique microscope collection, most of which hail from the1800s. Through many studies and rehearsals, the morphology of the crystals has been determined via specific solutions and durations in a semi-limpid, almost-amniotic bath. The final incarnation of the objects, which are either fully invaginated or partially encrusted to reveal the transit of their matter, is something akin to a crystalline reliquary. Analogous to all memory, the viewer is presented with a delicate entombment of a sly, fleeting construction. The crystals are preserved with paraloid, an archival solution used at archaeological dig sites and in the fixing and archiving of fossils.

Trans-Habitats exist at varying scales from a planet or biome to a cell or molecule. In my practice I deploy a similar scalar diversity, from the miniaturized worlds of the vitrines to the monumental land art of Mongolia and the Mall. The material condensation into a single spatiotemporal site of the mutually transformative encounters characteristic of autopoiesis, turns the works into focusing devices, instances of what occurs at planetary scale. The view provided, however, operating in the manner of a peephole or freeze-frame, is unavoidably misleading. The Trans-Habitat is dynamic, and not as static, individuated, or complete as the view might suggest: the artwork continues to act, encountering other bodies, escaping what appear to be its edges. The Trans-Habitat, with its premise that matter acts, disrupts conventional views of making art, what an artwork is and does, and what happens between a human and an artwork when they encounter one another. The switch has been thrown and everything bursts to life.

This latest body of works present new and experimental manipulations of materials that are resonant with the forced deformations of bonsai. Rare wood assemblages, fruits, vegetables, flowers, cacti, found objects, etc. are dipped in copper plating baths numerous times at different durations and intervals. Once the sculpture-specimens have reached their carrying capacity for copper on the wood’s surface, novel branching structures created of copper—i.e., what are called ‘dendrites’—begin to form along the bonsai-like sculpture’s body. In the beginning the shrubby sculptures are naked, bare, denuded of their foliage, but when the process commences they are re-lushed, becoming foliate with metal dendrites, leaf-like protuberances and grown copper articulations that bear a close morphological resemblance to coral or the rhizosphere. Additionally, these sculptures exist as reliquaries or tombs of that which is copper-plated. They are never static. As the organic contents change and denature and delaminate within (e.g. an orange desiccating into a small pit-like ball or flower petals wilting), and at that morphological site, the surface of the copper sculpture will patina, adorning ghostly imprint, a beautiful bruise from within and over time a copper shell of the original form is left – an entity that gets lighter with time.

The five small glass cubes exist as snapshots of the incalculable perimortal oscillation between life and death. Formaldehyde and epoxy sodden piles of an assortment of the cheap comforts to which our species has become habituated– fast food, pills, sugary cereal, etc. – are revealed under ultraviolet lamps to be fecund and hyperactive, erupting with cast glass fungal spores and the fruiting bodies of mushrooms. The discreet, forensic peep hole displays of these glowing, affective interactions illuminating the inside the wall, suggests these works are anything but dead.

This video is based on research, speculative theories and deep-sea encounters while aboard the research vessel Falkor Too in the East Pacific Rise – an expedition which took place one year ago via Schmidt Ocean Institute. All film work and data gathered were done via ROV “SuBastian” (The Remote Operated Vehicle which can reach depths up to 4,500m).

The “twilight” region of the ocean’s mesopelagic zone is where sunlight can barely penetrate, and is very faint and is also home to some of the most otherworldly, ineffable, and rarely encountered invertebrates. Most of the footage and dive data have never been seen before, and these animals are rarely encountered by scientists in the deep sea. Submarine film work was done under the direction of researchers and artists aboard the vessel during the ROV’s descent and ascent from the sea floor and the adjacent hydrothermal vent fields of the Pacific.

Here I debut some of my new filmic operations, such as “void cinema” and a soundscape generated entirely from the human body, and I partnered with longtime friend and producer Jorge Elbrecht, Schmidt Ocean Institute, and UCCA Dune to create a dark, psychedelic, unquantifiable index of twilight zone organisms encountered while at sea. Nothing has been digitally optimized, computer generated, or AI induced, which heightens the purity of the truly alien, entity-like invertebrates and echoes the central tenet of my practice: the aesthetic blurring of the natural and the artificial. The video is at once speculative and true to the hard sciences.

There are three installations which I will place under a category called “Narrative as Body.” This is Orphaned Land, Master’s Temple, and the two treadmills you will see. Narratives are bodies that for many humans function as reliable escorts into the umwelten of others. These are stories, but the works invoke rather than tell them. In this show, they are not stories in a traditional sense of having clear protagonists or heroes and villains, in a throughline that moves from beginning to middle to end. The stories are non-linear, partial and fragmented, and serve as prompts to ask further questions rather than providing answers or resolutions. Additionally, narratives and stories as fictions can reveal radical material potentials and exist as something akin to a prophecy.

As part of my ongoing construction of novel ecologies and living systems, and the organisms and habitats that constitute these ecologies, “The Plasm(0)void” series performs a moment of genesis within this sculptural rubric; a rubric founded on monist principles of matter, which remain endemic to my practice: all things are comprised of the same molecules (matter) and thus have equal agency to act and be acted upon. The name of the sculptures in the “Plasm(0)void” series is derived from their anatomy: they are incubators of unstable matter (i.e., 0), egg-shaped (i.e., ovoid) and exist as a colorful vacuum (i.e., the void). Plasma, also known as the fourth state of matter (i.e., it is neither liquid, solid or gas), exists as the “big bang moment” before neon gases are stabilized into their better-known morphologies of signage and technical equipment.

The work Destiny operates as a climax community in which the pioneers (in this case miniature novelty alcohol bottles) of devastated biomes have succeeded their former occupants. What is initially perceived as a landscape in its terminal state is seen, upon closer examination, to be flourishing. Humans may be gone but their relics survive and have become the homes of new settlers. The work presents an afterlife that has been established following the human perimortem period, but it is neither dystopian nor utopian. It operates instead in two zones simultaneously, that of the traumatic and that of the marvelous, and it is the tension between them that is the true signature of Destiny.

The selection of materials and their composition varies according to what is appropriate to a particular artwork, but the series of operations performed, while open to accident and chance, are always the same. These consist of intensifications, lacerations, arson, electrocutions, congestions, confusions, swarms, mixtures, impurities, splicing, pulsing of light, animations of metals, the mangling, maiming and distortion of objects originally perceivable as readymades, industrial fabrications, and commodities transformed into unrecognizable shapes. The décollaged assemblages of massed materials breaking down and breaking out into new forms, constitute the disorienting vistas and ‘unnatural’ combinations that materialize my favored environments: extreme situations and the conditions of crisis and trauma that are evocative of crime scenes and catastrophic events and yet are capable of evoking beauty. A dizzying barrage of sensations assaults the onlooker: what is going on, what does it mean, is that a rag tag shard of lingerie or a dead bat? Everything is liminal, in between, happening all at once. There are no clear categorical, hierarchical, or taxonomical locations, no discernable borders between living and dead, organic and inorganic, formed and formless, natural and artificial, creation and destruction. The project of disruption and defamiliarization labors simultaneously in the registers of concept and material. Concepts and matters are not considered identical and the artworks are not considered representations or materializations of a prior concept or idea. Concepts and materials inhabit one another, sometimes warring, sometimes cooperating, to disrupt reality in its hegemonic formations via a wild de-solidification of both materials and thought.