Paintings exploring mark-making without brushstrokes.

Prints made by manipulating small elements of the Baltimore landscape.

I am interested in the difference between an assortment of objects and an arrangement of objects. Different people will arrange objects various ways, but each arrangement will share the quality of being arranged. What is that quality?

I often try to understand this quality of arrangement by working with shelves. Shelves are objects that imply other objects will be arranged on them. I am curious about what happens when they resist expected arrangements, or when the objects being arranged on shelves are also shelves.

The shelves I make are based on drawings. Each drawing begins with two main lines, which become the major shelves in each wall piece. On these, smaller lines proliferate into unique shapes. These become smaller shelves and objects in the wall pieces they inspire.

The relationship between the drawings and the shelves is like that between a sketch and a painting. The shelves don’t replicate the drawings exactly. They are similar to paintings, but also provide a platform for the arrangement of objects.

In my drawing series, the shelves are invaded by colored dots and lines, which alter them. Over time, these invasions transform each shelf into another shelf entirely. In the wall pieces, these dots and lines become objects and subsidiary shelves.

It is also possible to investigate the idea of arrangement in other contexts, using language and readymade objects.

The piece “Case of Shelves,” for example, uses a readymade object--a wood and glass display case--as an opportunity for playful arrangement without a preparatory sketch. The spontaneous arrangement of readymade materials in “At Some Point” aims to balance them on perfectly on top of one another, without gluing or otherwise affixing them together.

As an artist, I often struggle to explain in words the response I have to visual art. The Piece titled “Green box” is about that gap between visual art and language. Speakers on the ladder beneath the green box play audio of a poem that tries to evoke the color green in words. The lines of this poem are another kind of arrangement. They begin with a faint sense of green, and progressively move toward a more intense evocation of it.

The work titled “Monument for a Cube,” finally, is an arrangement surrounding a cube equivalent in weight to the ashes that would be produced by cremating my body. The objects in the arrangement embellish the weight of my ashes.