My maternal family property was carved by eminent domain during the creation of Interstate 91-North in Massachusetts. This scene looks out on a parcel of this land after it was recently listed on the real estate market. The land didn't sell—there was no appetite for residential-zoned land adjoining a highway.
I barely thought about the tree-covered, dilapidated house next to the train tracks. I drove past it countless times, mentally filing it away as a spite-house along a busy commercial road. My sentiments changed during the summer of 2024 when I learned through a genealogy website that my paternal great-grandparents lived there; that my father spent time in that house as a child.
Around the time I made this discovery, the MASSDot project "Roadway Reconstruction and Related Work (Including Signals) on Sections of Route 5 and Damon Road" was 77-percent complete. The house had been demolished and in its place were mounds of dirt and sand, the aggregate upon which a traffic lane would swiftly usher drivers to Interstate 91-N or the nearby Walmart. The only readily available visuals of the house's existence were on Google Maps. Sifting through this source material, I gravitated towards what the building looked like just before it was destroyed: the windows and doors were boarded-up with plywood sheets sprayed-painted with red X's.
I've used Google Maps as a reference in previous bodies of work, specifically to make drawings of my maternal family's property. Coincidentally, my mother lived on the same street as my paternal great-grandparents, and her family's property was carved by eminent domain during the creation of Interstate 91-N.
In late 2018 I was told my maternal family home was being put on the real estate market. This was the home that my grandmother raised four children in, on property fragmented by eminent domain in their childhood to become a section of interstate 91-North. This was the home she died in, receiving end-of-life care as Alzheimer's disease made a familiar place become foreign. The house sold in 2023, rekindling deep, difficult feelings. Some wounds do not heal cleanly and re-open too quickly. This series is an attempt to collect myself.
To follow the trajectory of this creative thread, see the 2019 series For Sale: Mailbox Studies
Motif Number One, a red fishing shack that has stood for over 180 years in Rockport MA, is a well-known and beloved coastal attraction for plein-air painters. Instead of spending time in-situ with the shack in the baking sun amid throngs of tourists, I chose to paint a series depicting a birdhouse modeled after it. I also experimented with a digitally-rendered model I created to further push the formal potential of this object.
In late 2018 I was told that the property my maternal family owned for generations was being put on the real estate market. For Sale: Mailbox Studies I - VIII attempts to parse out my emotional connection to the land and to reflect on its history in lieu of the impending sale.
Google Maps allows users to toggle between street-view photography taken over time. The resulting visual record of Damon Road from 2009 to 2018 has been useful as an archive of the subtle changes in the property.
I gravitated towards the mailboxes that mark the home my mother grew up in. There are two mailboxes. One is for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the local newspaper. The other, with dairy cows in front of a red barn, stood proudly when my grandparents were alive but steadily and extravagantly deteriorated after my grandmother passed away. Held together with bungee cords, duct tape, and with cow imagery peeling off like the skin of an onion, this object is a succinct visualization of the property's slow decline.
The After Atlas series is a formalist study of an old USA road atlas. The roadmaps were cut-up, collaged, and used to influence composition and color. I gravitated towards the demarcation of certain areas: the beautiful dotted and dashed lines, muted palette, symbols, and relationships between organic and geometric boundaries.
A photoshoot of assembled kitsch objects and studio supplies helped inform the compositions for this series of ten paintings.
I modelled a box with a hole cut out from one side in a 3D-rendering program. Using the computer screen as a viewfinder, I was able to yield a variety of compositions solely by adjusting the vantage point of the 'viewer' to the 'subject'.
DERBY: An Interactive Sculpture Raceway, on view at the Godine Family Gallery, Boston from April 9 - 14, 2017, riffed on the concept and competitive spirit of the Boy Scouts’ famous Pinewood Derby. Curated by Ian Gage and I, Derby served as spiritual successor to Putt Putt: A Playable Mini Golf Course, displayed in the Student Life Gallery a year prior. Emphasis on interactivity helped to set apart these shows from their counterparts. Artists created kinetic sculptures—be they car or anti-car—that gallery visitors could race along a custom-made, six lane, 34–foot long track bisecting the gallery. Also included were 2D submissions that addressed concepts of racing, speed, and competition, as well as murals of scouts gearing up for the derby.
A total of 20 artists created 37 cars, ultimately arrayed resplendent with all the fixings of a real raceway. Examples of cars included those made entirely of raw potatoes, an internally lit unicorn riding a cloud, a wheel covered in wheels, and an enormous Milk Duds box replica.
The reception on April 13, 2017 featured an 11–heat bracketed tournament which determined the first, second, and third place champions. All the pageantry of a traditional derby, including a judge and parents of the entrants, made it a memorable night.
In 2016 I created a series of paintings about Twitch.com, a live-streaming video platform:
In March 2016 I participated in Putt-Putt, a group exhibition of MassArt alumni and students on view in the Student Life Gallery, Boston. The goal of this exhibition was to create a series of interactive sculptures that would collectively serve as a playable mini golf course. My contribution to this project was Golf Thoughts, an installation with a video projected onto the gallery wall, and several paintings installed on astroturf.
T.A.C.D. (Thinking About Computer Death) are meditations on the spontaneous and alarming visual glitches that occurred for several months on my relatively-new laptop. I was very anxious about its seemingly inevitable death, and also grateful for the bounty of beautiful, disquieting imagery it produced.
