Portfolio
In Extremis (2026) is a multimedia installation that examines the effects of climate change and human impact on the South Carolina coastline, and the ways in which eroding salt marshes impact the surrounding landscape to create ghost forests. As marshes erode, saltwater encroaches on the maritime forests, slowly killing living trees and turning them into decaying lumber.
Constructed devices are inspired by the Continuous Plankton Recorder, an instrument that allows the ocean to record itself using a continuous roll of gauze that collects physical material across hundreds of miles. Each transect can then be analyzed to better understand oceanic conditions. Drawing from this methodology, each workstation integrates video and audio that dissect and interpret different forms of data gathered at Hunting Island, SC. This work is the search for a transitional landscape and methods to quantify it. It is about personal and historic observations documenting a shifting landscape over time, and how all of these things combine to create a new environment that is in constant flux.
Limnologies(2025) is a large-scale installation and the culmination of two years of fieldwork on an island in Lake Superior, where the artists lived and worked off grid for two subsequent summers. Combining their research and work on the island with countless hours of studio and material experiments, the installation deeply explores the interplay of water, weather and geology. The title ‘Limnologies’ refers to the artists’ varied and extensive attempts to observe understand weather patterns occurring on the lake, ranging from systematic to absurd to poetic. Simultaneously, the project explores the effect of weather conditions and changing climate on human psychology.
The work utilizes documentation obsessively collected via a series of site-responsive, portable sculptures that function as observational mechanisms. The instruments poetically measure wind, waves, visibility, water level, and temperature, exploring both the possibilities and limitations afforded by perceptual observation. The artists engaged with the sky as cinema, extensively documenting color and clouds, which revealed geographically distant wildfires. Through a series of interconnected systems, the work responds to weather conditions through the production of drawing and sound. It additionally exists as performance (via documentation), video, writing and installation.
The project touches upon the lake as a “site of memory” by examining how weather patterns have manifested across long spans of time. The work posits that far from being static, geology is a dynamic, living entity that continues to shape and be shaped by changing climate. Scientific research into this region points to a series of entangled ecological systems whose complex interplay is difficult to comprehend and little understood.
Ghost Forest (2025) is a large-scale multimedia diorama that examines the effects of climate change and human impact on the South Carolina coastline and the ways in which the eroding salt marshes impact the surrounding landscape to create ghost forests. Ghost forests are the remnants of coastal woodlands that have been lost to rising sea levels, pushing saltwater farther inland. As seawater seeps into the soil, it disrupts the ecosystem, leaving behind dead trees that mark the boundary between land and encroaching ocean. The diorama combines my personal documentation of Hunting Island, SC, historic documentation of the changing coastline, found artifacts, and tools that trace my attempt at understanding
Keweenaw Observing Station (2021-24)is a collaborative multimedia artwork with Aly Ogasian that examines the effect of climate change on Lake Superior and the Great Lakes System. The work consists of a series of site-responsive, portable sculptures that function as observational stations/instrumentation as well as repositories of information. These sculptures are inspired by local NOAA monitoring systems, such as the Great Lakes Water Levels Monitoring Network. The instruments poetically measure wind, waves, visibility, water level, and temperature, exploring both the possibilities and limitations afforded by perceptual observation. Within the artwork, our observations are contextualized vis-a-vis large, ongoing collections of data via satellite imagery, scientific instrumentation, human memory, and citizen science intended to help predict the future of the lake. The project touches upon the lake as a “site of memory” by examining how winter conditions contribute to subsequent summers while also engaging with psychological experience and human memory.
Living Water (2022) is a multimedia site-specific installation at Maajaam Farm for Art and Tech, Estonia. The Estonian bog landscape offers an enigmatic zone for exploration; it is a territory where the register between remote sensing data and ground truth is unusually slippery. We approach the river, the riverbank, and bog and as both pseudoscientists and artists in search of boundaries, edges and ecotones. A floating observation station is positioned at this boundary - where habitats combine, the shifting periphery between water and shoreline mark sites of transformation that are difficult to capture because they are subject to constant change. The sculptural observation station carefully considers the fragility of the environment in which it is placed, recognizing that peat restoration in bogs is key to Estonia’s climate action plan. The station uses scientific observational tools and methodologies such as a Secchi disk, cyanometer, and a Forel Ule Scale in order to document the shifting ecotone.
Levelling Network (2019-20) is a multimedia installation. The Kronstadt tide gauge was called the Hub of the Universe by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. It is the site from which all depths and altitudes in Russia are measured and determined, and it is one of the most comprehensive collections of sea-level data in the world. In Levelling Network, the tide gauge is a site of knowledge and ritual. It is used as a reference point to understand my surrounding landscape, measure my relationship to it, and investigate the history of Kotlin island.
I traveled to the tide gauge every day for two weeks to take measurements, and each night I analyzed and dissected these measurements in my studio space. From my window, the Kronstadt Naval Cathedral was well lit at all hours, and its presence became a constant beacon filling up the space. The dome became my navigational aid and a benchmark by which all other things were measured.
Levelling Network is a work about the tide— about taking measure and failing to communicate, both through language and data. Levelling Network explores my relationship with the tide gauge and the naval cathedral dome and displays how they are used as tools to collect, measure, and explore. The installation combines my processes, the tools I developed to examine the Kronstadt landscape, and the artifacts that resulted from this process of exploration.
Farthest North (2017-19) synthesizes the profound psychological effect of traversing one of the most rarefied places on Earth in the footprints of a failed explorer. In 1897, explorer S.A. Andrée attempted to fly to the North Pole in a silk hydrogen balloon. Andrée intended to be first to the North Pole, and planned to map the region using aerial cameras engineered for cartographic use. Shortly after taking off from the archipelago of Svalbard, however, the expedition crashed. Their remains were found 33 years later, the cause of their deaths unknown. Amongst the remains were several canisters of exposed film, preserved in the snow.
Miles away in space and time, we spent the better part of 2016 deciphering the topography of the arctic landscape through the flat surface of a screen, closely inspecting each pixel. Later that summer, we travelled to the high arctic, retracing the route of Andrée. From the top of a mountain, we gazed across Virgohamna, the same arctic harbor that appears in Andrée’s photographs, and below them observed the remains of his balloon hangar, ravaged by the harsh climate.
Lacuna (Ostrov Zhannetty) (2019) is an attempt to understand a mysterious island that appears as a blank spot on the map in the Siberian Arctic. Paintings of the island were done every day for several weeks by exploring Ostrov Zhannetty using google earth. From our studio, we used our cursors to explore pixels-noting bends in the coastline and depressions where snow collected. We searched for moments where digital resolution fails, and document the expectations we form as the result of spotty data. Objects collected directly from the landscape are hung strategically to map out the shape of the island in order to develop our own theories about the terrain.
Arc of Visibility (2015) points to a never-ending process, a series of attempts to measure an infinite line, to chart the color of the sky, to capture the single point where a shift occurs in a limitless expanse. Using altered surveying equipment I document the sea and the process of being in between two places.
Departing from the familiar, I begin a process of navigating the unknown. Through this transit, I extend my own boundaries into un-encountered territory and embrace the unforeseen. Using devices that refer to both the past and the future without positioning themselves in either, I displace fragments of landscape, allowing you to experience places and events in many ways at once. These constructed tools take in light and reflect my surroundings, allowing me to measure and record my position in relation to the infinite horizon line, or the apex of a wave.
Seeing, counting, and measuring are ways of understanding; creating tools to record and quantify these measurements allows me to understand them in relation to myself. Using these devices, I attempt to orient myself by examining place via the lens of personal experience and primary observation, often selecting points that are ultimately impossible to calibrate against.
Captured Landscape, 2014 is a Mixed Media Installation. Platform detailing the Silicon Valley Terrestrial Explorers’ Expedition sites: Sweeney Ridge (San Francisco Discovery Point), Crystal Dam, Sand Hill Road, Ampex Sign, Muybridge’s experimental track, last camp of the Portola Expedition, Federal Telegraph Site, Fairchild Semiconductor Site, Google, Centrillion Biosciences, Lunar Orbiter Recovery Project (McMoon), Airborne Sensor Facility, Site of Onizuka Air Force Station, Santa Clara Station, The Lick Observatory/Mount Hamilton
Semaphore(2014) is a body of work creates both a space and a void. It speaks of the moment after an utterance, before the utterance reaches another. It fails at communication, but tells you that it is possible. It underscores the absence of being there. My work revolves around my desire to substantiate my existence, and the need to reach out beyond my isolation to connect with the viewer.
Dead Reckoning (2014) In navigation, dead reckoning (also ded [for deduced] reckoning or DR) is the process of calculating one's current position by using previously determined position, or fix, and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course.
As each estimate of position is relative to the previous one, errors are cumulative*, or compounding multiplicatively or exponentially, if that is the co-relationship of the quanta.
*"signal" refers to the wanted information; "noise" is something unintentionally added to the signal: "These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy for facsilimile), etc." Both signal and noise are information. What determines which is which?
