Sub Terra

Abstract Sub Terra is an immersive exhibition that renders intangible states of mind through sculptural installation. These constructions speak to internalized angst and complexity, mirroring what is seldom looked at, witnessed, or acknowledged. Many symbolic elements are suspended from either the walls and ceiling or within constructed frames, evoking entanglement. My work is an attempt to express the emotion turmoil inherent to living in an increasingly bureaucratic society and its effect on someone with an anxiety disorder. The fabrication entails several broad skill sets, requiring familiarity with psychology, physiology, fine woodworking, ceramics, felting, and drafting. Preliminary sketches guided construction and determined the order of operations. Each project required its own timeline, with multiple parallel aspects in process on any given day for two and a half years. The emphasis of materials usage of ceramics, wood, and fiber–were largely determined by familiarity, although I was also motivated by a desire to move away from a comfortable center to an unrestricted experimental zone of uncertain outcome, mimicking the psychological aspects of social dislocation. I push these materials to perform in unconventional ways, creating ceramic pulleys and hardware that hold tremendous weight and tension. I am indebted to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, the ceramic sculpture of Stephen de Staebler, the German postmodernist Anselm Kiefer, Eva Hesse, and Martin Puryear. These diverse practitioners and periods have suffused my aesthetic sensibility. I am equally indebted to the painters and photographers Egon Schiele, Eugene Atget and Joel Peter Witkin as a counterpoint to sculpture. Since encountering the suspended work of Cornelia Parker, I have become obsessed with efforts to overcome gravity. The levitation of ceramics has become a hallmark of the last six years of my work as seen here in Pacifier I and II, Faggot Tower, Interstitial, and Bad Boy Windchimes.