Sharp Song, Crop Over
Designed as a site-specific installation for Sylvester Manor, a former provisioning plantation on New York’s Shelter Island. In 2014, after being stewarded by a single family over fifteen generations (since 1652) it became a non-profit educational farm and music venue.
Sharp Song, Crop Over is physically comprised of two parts: (1) an ensemble of large cane knife idiophones that visitors to the Manor can play and (2) a bagasse “seed pattern” labyrinth that visitors can walk through, contemplating the many identities of the property over the centuries.
The cane knife instruments of Sharp Song, Crop Over have a two-fold conception: an homage to a simple, universal farm tool (the machete) as an extension of the hand and a new fieldsong, one radiating from field tools, that allows us to get at honest and often difficult, messy stories about New York’s agricultural history. In dissonance and harmony with these knives, reflective of the labyrinthine qualities of cane fields, the surrounding labyrinth will provide a physical pathway for artistic, historical or spiritual contemplation.
Part of the installation title, Crop Over, references a centuries-old Barbadian laborers’ festival celebrating the end of the sugarcane harvest and is now the Caribbean’s premiere summer carnival. Crop Over also defines what happens at the point of contact with the knife.
x Smithsonian Folkways x Alabama Chanin
I took under-selling stock print t-shirts from Smithsonian Folkways and, after creative conversations with designer Natalie Chanin, had them cut and reassembled in her highly coveted styles for women and men. Sold in my shop, these limited-edition, signed shirts, crafted by the Southern seamstresses of the CFDA Award-winning brand Alabama Chanin, invoke not only Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s sage wisdom, they also honor the Smithsonian Institution’s pioneering record label, Folkways Recordings, and the values of hand-sewing and repurposed materials. Notice the knots with trailing thread, the cross-stitch and piecework holding it all together.
Now, as ever, we need our music and our voices to surround hate...and force it to surrender.
Swollen Scarlets
Designed for Containment a Proteus Gowanus gallery show exploring our increasingly troubled relationship with water.
Water-engorged vegetable cellulose transcribes the sensation of swelling and constriction. While still waterless and compressed, each dry briquet of cellulose was bound with nettles-twine then dipped in a cool, pigmented water bath to swell around its constrictions. Like most natural sea sponges these 67 Scarlets prefer to anchor themselves on firm surfaces. Each floats on a 3-foot, gold-mirror bottomed acrylic lake allowing us to think metaphorically about conceptual containers of water that hold reflections.
Barnacles
This is one of my ongoing studio projects that started (and continues) with my sketches of the 1000+ species of marine barnacles. I then sketch them three dimensionally using paper, fiber, clay and sometimes metal.
My work creating these barnacles is a meditation above all. It is also a study of adhesion (cement glands), shallow waters, the sense of touch, dwellings, and more. It's inspired by my childhood spent on East Island where I found barnacles on ordinary and surprising surfaces.
Open Auction
A collection of six handmade sound boxes, each containing a sonic burst of callings by legendary auctioneer John Korrey. Lift the lid and the light-activated board is tripped to amplify the recording. Playful exploration of another kind of vanishing physical retail environment, the Auction House.
Ka-Ching
The sound of closing a sale. I thought a lot about this during the four years of my retail shop. The classic rings of a mechanical cash register that filled my grandfather's stores were largely absent from my shop. Mixing recordings I made at Bernie Faerman's old cash register depot on the Bowery with recordings of credit card swipes from my Square pocket-sized register, I looped the music and it became a little rhythmic installation that chronicled retail transactions over a century.