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Artist Statement

"All elements of the cultural past must be reinvested or disappear." - Guy Debord

As a child growing up in the working class neighborhoods of Baltimore, my first drawing tools were the mulch chips that lined the flowerbed of my row house. Bending down on hand and knee, the sidewalk turned into a never-ending piece of paper where I could draw the mysterious hulking factories, shipyards and blast furnaces that surrounded my home and called my family to work every morning. As the mulch made contact with the gritty concrete surface, it would screech, scrape and crumble with every mark, leaving a rich brown powdery trail until the piece in my hand had dissolved.

Today, the mulch and concrete have been replaced with traditional materials, but the intention of documenting industrial and military architecture remains my purpose for making art. Working from both historic images and photographs I take on-site, I use Adobe Photoshop to remove structures from their original context so they can be digitally reconfigured into new and unfamiliar environments. I then employ the impermanence of charcoal as a means of exploring the fragile state of our remaining industrial sites by finely rendering the digital composites into large-scale environments of carbon on paper. Through this unexpected collaboration between dimension and silhouette, historic and new, preserved and lost, my goal is to communicate the invaluable potential for the repurposing of industrial architecture within our urban landscape and spark a curiosity for others to investigate the compelling history contained within each environment.

Selected Press