Through my work, I investigate the often-tenuous relationships between human culture, science and the environment. My installations frequently call upon viewers to expand their awareness of the worlds they inhabit — whether those worlds are their own bodies or the spaces that surround them.
In my recent series of lightbox photographs entitled: The Archive, I draw upon a vast inventory of prosthetic devices and medical instruments collected for their historical value in order to comment on the human desire to fetishize and even anthropomorphize objects used to augment or investigate the human body. These large-scale images, taken at the College of Physicians and the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia emphasize both the historical and modern desire to control and manipulate our corporeal selves.
The multi-media installation, Sensing Terrains, created for the rotunda at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., contains scanning electron micrographs of sensory organs juxtaposed with photographs of Japanese gardens designed to "tickle the senses." Freed from the confines of scale and context, these specimens and garden details become hybrid landscapes where viewers can travel through tastebuds and cellular material into a scramble of roots, reminiscent of complex vascular systems. The sensory experience of Sensing Terrains is intensified by an interactive soundscape, triggered at various locations throughout the installation and evoking the sound of blood coursing through the body, a heartbeat, and the trancelike hum of Buddhist chants.
Recent time-based work includes Eureka Poem, a series of video vignettes for the Digital Video Theater (dome theater) in the Jordan Hall of Science at Notre Dame University. These vignettes suggest that nature exists as one substance-based reality, and that complex patterns of formation and movement found in it reveal of a series of embedded codes. Dark Skies, a multi-media collaboration with the architectural firm Axi-Ome and sound designer Christopher Ottinger was recently exhibited at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute Gallery. The installation includes a multi-channel projection on dimensional, CNC routed tiles based loosely on the topography of a human tastebud. Dark Skies is an astronomical reference, referring to remote places free of hazy city light that allow for an extended view into deep space and time.