spaces    objects    images    sounds   exhibitions               info 




Astral Capsule
1960-2023




The vision for this 1960 camper was to make a device for traveling, but not just through space. I worked with the client closely to lay out the floor plan, systems, and aesthetic of the space in order to elicit a futurism of the past–potentially what a 1970s European train cabin concept might have looked like.

When it arrived, the camper was in derelict shape, and needed not just repair, but a full re-design, as it had been stripped by the previous owner who had a vision for it, but never followed through. Because of that, it was full of treasures, including period correct wall paneling from a ranch home, vintage stove and range hood, and various bits needed to fix it up.

Evicting squirrels and ants was not what i expected to be the first item on the punch list, but it qucikly revealed deeper issues of wood rot and giant holes where water had collected over time. A full re-seal and repair was required. Insulation, new cork floor, entirely new wiring, and a paintjob later, it keeps warm and cool, and isn’t full of uninvited guests.


The real work, though, was the new furniture. Right as the project began, I found a rowhouse in downtown Troy being gutted for a renovation, and a dumpster outside full of old-growth timbers considered useless by the contractors. Once I milled them down, they revealed very tight growth rings, evidence of their old age when they were first felled.


That lucky find shaped the style of furniture planned for the space, and it cemented a theme. The guts of an old cedar closet were donated to the project, along with the old wall panels; all of it would be framed by the douglas fir, in both senses of the word.



I also experimented with techniques of curving wood, learned first on the cedar sanctuary, to allow for soft shapes that would lend space to the small camper. 


I installed a 1’ cubic wood stove to keep it warm in the winter. The power system runs on a small battery system powered by foldable solar panels. It runs overhead lights, 120V outlets, a small fridge, and a 12V overhead vent system. I also matched the pattern of the old paneling to make custom fabric for bench cushions that unfold into a secondary bed. 



Using wood ripped out of an 1880s rowhouse (that was invariably 100 yrs old when it was milled into 2x4s), a mobile solar panel system from Right Now, and a vision of a 1970s future, this little capsule is well prepared for a long life, wherever (or whenever) it might go. 


As Above, So Below
2023










Made as a commission for the Brattleboro Museum, for a yearly show about ice fishing, specifically focused on ice shanties. I am fascinated by vernacular architectural styles, and how structures designed around specific purposes and constraints look like. The prompt for this show was clear: make something to populate a “village” of ice shanties that expand the definitions of the normal shack. I started thinking about how the hole in the ice is a kind of portal between worlds, and wanted to highlight the slip-space between them. 








American Pickup
Ongoing



I’ve been obsessed with cars and trucks since I was a child. One of my first books was a picture booked called simply TRUCK that still gives me a synesthetic response every time I look at it. The personal truck is a cornerstone of the American myth of self-reliance. It is a mobile monument to toughness, utility, industrialism, and rugged individualism, despite its dependance on a vast, energy-intensive web of materials, fuel and support. Originally devised to haul agricultural products to marketplaces, they served (and still serve) as a bridge between the labor of farming and consumer society. Their use has expanded through marketing and advertising to signify certain themes of identity, particularly around masculinity. There’s a grunge, a heaviness, and a sacrificial quality to the pickup.



I am not immune. I bought a 1987 Dodge from a junkyard moslty because it looked cool, and I liked how it felt to imagine myself driving it. And if I could turn it into an art project, somehow, then I could hide the fact that I just wanted it. But what began as a simple refresh turned into a complete rebuild. The engine had been horribly neglected, and I slowly and paintsakingly brought it back to life (or so I thought) over the course of a year, climbing fully inside the engine bay at times to get to the issues.




That engine died weeks after I’d finished rebuilding it. I had made some horrible mistake that had locked up the engine entirely.  I was dejected, but knew I had to fix it. Later that week, I had a dream that my friend and mechanic guru found me a perfect replacement engine, and that it was blue. The next day, he told me his dad found one that had been sitting around for a decade. I rebuilt that one in his shop, and of course painted it the same blue I had dreamed of. We swapped it in over the course of a weekend, as 107.7 WGNA played a song called “I’ve got a heart like a truck” on repeat, nearly once an hour. When we were done, we put the old engine in the bed, which made me realize that a truck is special being–it can carry its own broken heart around.











Below are a few entries from my “repair log:”

3/23:

I’ve pulled apart the engine in the truck now. First the intake manifold, all 50 lbs of it, then the valve covers and heads, loosening the ten bolts that hold each one down in the specified pattern, outwards to in. There are so many of these little choreographed bolt tightenings when working on an engine. It’s all filthy, too. This one was leaking oil for years without maintenance, so the oil is thick, solidified. It really does look like a thin, toxic cake.  
As I work on the heads and block, scrubbing the old oil off, I get these flashes of the 1980s, when this engine was cast and machined in a giant factory.  I chase the threads on all the bolt holes in the head, and the sludge that comes out smells like burned popcorn and butter, acrid but somehow fatty. Dinosaur bones, i guess. The deep time and compression. What does oil do in the ground, if it’s part of the earth’s body? Which humor does it handle? Is it the bile? Or is it like a liquid memory or something like that?



What did the factory smell like? How many people worked on these pieces of cast iron, and how did they read the symbols stamped into it? One of them says “1” and the other say “2”, with Chrysler pentagrams and date codes inside. What did new look like then?

Anyway, my hands ache from gripping the scotch-brite. Scraping the old gaskets and rust off, the slip of citrus degreaser makes it hard to hold with gloves. It reminds me: manufacturing is industrial, but repair is artisanal. Thinking with hands. I hammer out the old galvanized freeze plugs and replace them with brass. Caught them just in time, too, as the interior faces look like the surface of the moon.

I mostly do not share these thoughts with people because I don’t expect them to find it interesting or important in any way. The slow philosophical/sensual understanding of old technology is not something that seems to be valued in today’s world. Or at least not in the ways I find to be most interesting. There are lots of people who would take shallow lessons about mindfulness or, at best, revery from monotonous handiwork, but I think there are deeper channels to plumb.

This metal holds literal energy from almost 50 year ago. It exists in this present moment, always. it has always been now for this machine —it’s heart has been beating off and on at intervals unknown to it, but always in time with itself.
 



4/11:

65Sporty says I should check the heads for straightness before putting them back on the block. I used an aluminum ruler, but he says to use one that’s made of steel. If they’re off by .003 inch anywhere, they should get milled flat. Where do you get an accurate steel straight edge? Seems like a machinist thing, and it makes me wonder if these guys on the forums all just exist adjacent to machine shops, and precision tools just float around in their lives, embers left over from the 1960s.

And anyway, how can you tell which is flatter, the engine or the straight edge? Precise measuring devices were made by precise equipment, in turn made by precise measuring devices. I type on this computer because of a straight edge made in the 1700s, etc. There are Youtube wormholes devoted to the histories of how precision was encoded and enhanced over time.  If you follow it down far enough, wouldn’t the first bits of precision come from hand gestures? Or would they be derived through elegant use of geometries?

65Sporty welcomes everyone new to the forum by saying “Welcome from the mitten” (Michigan). There’s so much grandfather energy on this board - the warm welcomes, the general lack of organization, the off-topic posts describing hobbies, the longest of which is about sleeping, title “Yaaawwwwn”. It’s only just dawning on me, but perhaps I’m drawn to them, on this truck forum, over all the others, because I’m searching for my grandfather, my mom’s dad Bernie, who was a traveling car parts salesman. He’d probably be interested in the truck. It has decals from the 1987 Indianapolis 500 on it, a race that he frequented. My mom grew up in Indy, and even went to a couple races with him. I have his commemorative beer mugs, with the names of winning drivers and their average speeds, one year per mug.



Bernie might have been at the 1987 500, though maybe they had moved to New Jersey by then. He died in 1990, when I was two. He insisted on calling me Gus, and even bought me a little onesie with big GUS printed on it. We have strikingly similar bodies. The way he holds himself, head canted to one angle, staring at an engine, or sitting on a stump holding his leg. He was beautiful. I wonder about bodies, passed down through genetic and epigenetic traits. Did he contort himself into engine bays in the same ways that I do?

I watched the footage from that year, digitized by ABC and put online, all 4 hours of it. Maybe he’s in the stands there, as the camera pans left, across the teeming thousands watching Mario Andretti command the lead, then lose due to mechanical issues. The helper trucks are all Dodges, red with chrome accents, rushing out with emergency crews. Maybe I could find one, a real one. Though maybe this one was real, too.






Oak Street
ongoing



In 2019 I bought a house. It had gone into foreclosure years before, and sat vacant for almost a decade. It was built at some point in the 1800s, renovated once in the 1950s and again in the ‘70s. When I found it, all the copper in the heating system had been stolen, the roof leaked, the basement was like a jungle, etc. etc. but, as they say, it had good bones

I ripped out the carpets,  wood paneling, a lot of formaldehyde-rich MDF and four drop ceilings. I did all this without a clear plan in mind, but in order to know the house better–removing layers of additions to reach the skeleton, which (I hoped) might show me what it wanted to be.
The house sits on unceded Mohican land (who now go by the Stockbridge Munsee), just about 1000ft uphill from the Mahicannittuk. It faces north, to a paved street, with woods on the south side, which roll into a gulley around a small stream that babbles its way down to the river. When Troy was colonized and industrialized, this part of town was in iron production.

There are half a dozen waterfalls within walking distance to the river, which offered free power for machines. They were measured in horsepower, and were harnessed by 1800s iron-barons to run giant foundries. The majority of horsehoes and railroad spikes in the U.S. were manufactured here. I wonder about the toxicity of the soil, after all that production work. I unearth so much trash no matter where I dig.






Some of the layers were physical, and some of them olfactory. Freeze-thaw cycles and moisture in the carpets meant that the house stank, somewhere between wet dog and salt&vinegar chips. There were months when I thought it might never go away.  To combat the smells, I took to burning incense everywhere I could, using whatever I could find. These quickly became little temporary sculptures: Construction Blessings.



They burned as I worked, the house still stank, I worked more, and after what felt like endless painting, sanding, cutting, removal and open windows and more incense, the smell of mold, cigarette smoke, dog fur, and air fresheners finally retreated (after about 6 months).  

I started living here a few months into the project, after one room and the kitchen were clean enough to enjoy, and slowly picked away at it. 2020 was a good year to be engaged at home, and without shows or residencies to go to, it felt good to pour my energy into this structure. It took a long time to get here, but I now see this work as an extension of my sculpture practice (which, in turn, is influenced by years of study and employment in architecture).






Every building has a complex web of stories embedded in it, and I’ve learned a few about this house. Early on, the previous owner dropped by a handful of times to see what it looked like after the sale, and when I gave her a collection of leftover objects and paperwork that was hers, she returned again a week later with some artifacts: a photograph of two residents taken in 1956 and a skeleton key that unlocks the one original door in the house.

It means a lot that she gave me her blessing - she raised her kids here, still lives nearby, and had such a strong connection to the place. She gave me valuable information about the natural springs buried under the house across the street, which yard had the best soil and provided the most veggies, etc. She also left behind half a dozen bird feeders posted up around the yard.
A house this old has some sag, some tilt, both markers of geologic or structural movement over 150 years, along with the imperceptible presence of those that have died here. This deep time is present here, and the material clues are abundant. Some things are timeless: I would imagine the turkey vultures, hawks and eagles have always used the hill’s thermals to coast and circle above looking for prey.

A house like this, sitting here since the 1870s, bridges the gap between these human time scales and the more eternal ones. 







Living inside of a project turned out to be more complicated (and hazy) than I had thought. The sheer number of tasks meant that there was a psychic burden attached to whatever I happened to look at. My mind would race through all of the little things that needed to get done and then I’d suddenly realize I’d been standing frozen in a doorway for 5 minutes. That took a long time to get over. I’m not sure exactly what did it, but this is all to say: I went slowly.



I learned traditional plaster along with modern drywall techniques, a bit of plumbing, basic electrical, enhanced my structural understanding and, more than anything else, dirt and dust management. That slow speed ended up becoming a boon to the project, since ideas would emerge naturally; a complicated plan would dissolve immediately when a new, simpler version emerged. Many of the design choices happened this way, and feel strong because of it. 

I was working intuitively, and without much of a plan, but once clear ideas for big changes appeared, I needed to go through the code office. The building was techincally still vacant and therefore at risk of massive fines unless inspected, so I drew up plans of the house and applied for permits.





An ethos has emerged along with these ideas: to use and augment what is here before importing any new material. That means taking the low-rent railing and carving a globe into it rather than tossing it into the garbage, cutting a window into the staircase and leaving the original studs exposed rather than spend the energy on a big new header, etc. To avoid getting another dumpster, I made a sculpture out of an old set of exterior stairs:




In the back of the house, I opened up a slim porch that had been added in 1890, and instead of blowing it out, I tried to massage a better flow into it. I moved the back door over ~6 ft, to where a window had been, and added a door to the porch.

With those two small changes, the entry sequence changed dramatically. The backyard is now a straight shot from the kitchen, rather than a long zig zag through a dark hallway. I removed a bit of material, re-used almost all of it, and added a total of four 2x4s, 2 stair stringers, and some paint.

I am far from the first person to champion salvaged materials and cheap renovation, but even that has become monetized as an aesthetic or theme. Actual resourcefulness will never look one way –it always responds directly to the situation at hand.
With all of these choices, I’m hoping that the house can begin to speak for itself. Perhaps if I peel away the layered time in this thing, it will start to show the bones of early colonial industrialization of this land, and our continued occupation of it. Perhaps I am optimistic (or maybe naive) to think that anything architectural can describe its own toxicity, but I can try. Along with this, I want to make a home that feels good. Perhaps it is too much to ask, but I hope not.

As a culture (I mean “American” construction culture here), we build with too much material. We renovate when we should refine, demolish when we should restore, and build new when we should keep an area wild. We keep building homes. It will be the death of us, and most everyone else; buildings account for the majority of global emissions. Can a different ethos change that?







In some ways, I’ve approached the renovation as a set of details, and that does seem fitting, since each piece of the house has a very particular flavor to it, described by layers of material from the 1800s, 1950s, ‘70s, ‘90s and the present. There is no sweeping plan, or a pinterest board, but instead an approach. It’s helped me see that the majority of my projects are like that: using a premise (the project) to find a new way to approach the world at large. 







Woven Earth
ongoing





I have been scavenging textiles in the woods, then stretching them onto custom frames to capture specific moments on their surfaces. The resulting Landscape Paintings reveal the encounter between human materials and natural forces.