Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
I’m an artist and educator, deeply curious about why we collect and create the things we do.
How did your interest in art begin and how did you get to where you are focused now?
Growing up, my family moved frequently. My mom saw the momentous and ongoing changes as opportunities for reinvention. Those early experiences no doubt encouraged my attachment to cut-up collage aesthetics, a form of expression that mirrors how I experience the wobbliness of life.
Describe your current studio or workspace
My studio is in our home, a typical Chicago two-flat built in 1895. One Victorian bedroom houses my personal library, and a smaller bedroom is for storage. I work on my grandparents’ dining room table, cutting up photographs and drawing on plants in a dining room where family meals are not eaten. In the living room, I test installation strategies, which often expand into all available spaces, much like the weeds in our urban garden.
Could you describe your practice as well as process?
I create site-specific immersive installations inspired by hothouses—environments fostering rapid development. My work is rooted in observing my surroundings and exploring my relationships with plant life, technology, and networked systems. I start by examining plants in our home and garden, which inspire new material explorations.
Plants, fauna, green spaces, and the natural world are common themes amongst your work. Can you talk about your interest within these themes as well as their connection to photography for you and in general?
Photographs and plants are central to my life and naturally became my primary subjects. Both gardens and photography are defined by interactions between the scientific, accidental, and temporal. In a world where nature is depleting, I use photography’s capacity for infinite reproduction to envision boundless plant life. I arrange varied representations of living forms in direct response to each exhibition space’s unique characteristics.
Photography captures a certain thing, person, place in time, freezing what otherwise may decay and disappear. How does time play into your work, especially in the context of working with such natural-focused imagery?
Time’s complexity fascinates me. I work slowly and methodically to create a reservoir of dynamic works, allowing me to quickly build complex, ephemeral installations for exhibitions. Inspired by garden spaces’ varied time scales and growth patterns, I cut, knot, and weave elements like photographs, chains, sculptures and dried plants with paracord, suspending matter in space to evoke themes of survival and interconnectedness. Last summer, I followed the growth of sunflowers from seed to mature plants, then spent months drawing on the harvested stalks and flowers. These sunflower drawings, often taller than me, were incorporated into a 92-foot long immersive installation.
What is influencing your work right now?
Teaching significantly influences my work as I balance creating with encouraging others to create. I think a lot about how photographs operate in our lives and how evolving ethics and technologies reshape photography. This exploration drives my desire to make photographic processes more tangible and immersive. Currently, I’m tracking new sunflower developments and envisioning post-bloom hours spent encasing them in drawn bioplastic webs.
While working with nature-based imagery, you also use a wide array of bright neon colors and lights to create your installations. Can you talk about your choices to combine such unnatural coloring with your imagery?
I draw inspiration from blooming flowers’ vibrant colors and scientific imaging techniques that use artificial color palettes to reveal hidden properties. By combining bright neon colors and filtered lights with overlapping depictions of nature, I create complex networks of competing images, mirroring the sensorial experience of living in a media-saturated world.
What do you collect?
I can’t resist drying cut flowers, picking up fallen branches, and collecting leaves to press and draw on. My partner often jokes, “Do you really need another stick?” knowing the answer is always yes.
What have you been listening to/reading lately?
I’m reading Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, listening to The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger, and streaming the 2024 Tour de France while weaving new forms with paracord.
What are some recent, upcoming or current projects you are working on?
I’m currently finishing an experimental video tribute to a dear friend and mentor for an upcoming exhibition marking the tenth anniversary of their passing. I’m also taking a photogravure class to explore techniques new to me, preparing for an outdoor installation in a former steel casting bunker, and planning an immersive solo exhibition at a university gallery. Additionally, I’m adjusting to my turn in the role as chair of our dynamic photo department.
Interview conducted and edited by Lily Szymanski. Portrait image credited Jonathan Michael Castillo.