Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

I live and work in New York. I’ve been here since 2019 after a long time in Baltimore and a stint in Richmond for school.

I usually just say I make sculpture, since that still seems to encompass everything for me. I think the work I make just tries to better understand the way material and images operate. It often feels like a survey of stress tests in and between spaces where recognition happens. I want to know when one thing becomes something else and why it becomes something else. Usually that ends up resonating with a number of real-world concerns.

I’ve followed a somewhat extended thought about how sound works over the last several years, but I’ve also been returning to drawing lately. I guess I’ve been taking a break from writing.

 

How do you see your work evolving in parallel to things that are going on around you right now?

There’s been a funny dynamic where trans people were able to get a bit at ease between DSM V and 2025, and it became gauche to be making work about transness (like yes OK bitch, everyone’s trans). Now that it has swung back to such an explicit, overwhelming, and globalized effort to squeeze us out of public life, I’ve felt more comfortable thinking through these structures in public again.

Sometimes during artist talks, I’ve started showing images of my exposed skull during the brow feminization procedure I received. It’s usually interesting because from one angle, it’s straightforward and clarifies parts of a sculptural sensibility—seeing the way that bone gets inlaid with titanium links and 3d printed form—but from another, it clarifies a subtext that I can reference to the audience: that this and similar procedures are simultaneously painful, invasive, lifesaving, and frankly, often unnecessary when minors are given access to proper trans care early enough to avoid the development that demands such a procedure. It’s a chance to mention the importance of allowing teens to access puberty blockers and other completely safe tools of trans care.

But of course, showing that imagery is also kind of a joke, it’s basically the same gag as the burlesque scene in The Monster Club (1981), where a silhouetted entertainer (performed by Suzanna Willis) slips off her lingerie and then slowly begins to pull ribbons of her flesh off until she’s just a gyrating skeleton against the backlight stage. It cuts to the audience and a monster’s eyes are popping out of its skull awooga style and these two old men are just like, “Beautiful bones, don’t you think?” So, showing that skull image of mine is like the monster response to, “have you gotten the surgery?”

Anyway, I don’t know if I would have started getting as explicit in the midst of a studio practice without that swing back, especially since there are a lot of ways the work remains primarily interested in form and the relationship between an object and its name (or lack thereof).

How were you introduced to the mediums that you work with?

I work with things I was introduced to through labor, through weathered objects I come across, through various obsessions, through sex. Sometimes they’re objects I want to put on or in my body, other times, maybe they just resonate. I’ve started using steel recently because it doesn’t break when I can’t store it nicely.

I’ve been taught some of the more involved processes and others I taught myself. I like found objects because they feel figurative to me.

 

What influences do you think play an essential role in your work?

I don’t know about long term, but I’ve been thinking pretty consistently about Footwork for the last few years, it’s regular studio background noise for me. It’s not a cultural space that I come from or that necessarily makes any sense for me to take part in, but the genre is so important and so overlooked in at least a few spaces that perhaps should be more concerned with it. But, it’s on my mind all the time. I think about how strange the approach makes such familiar things, how completely dry 909 samples and cut up digestions of the world morph into something so perpetually new just through frantic repetition and syncopation.

Mostly, I’ve realized that this is close to the studio sensibility I aspire towards when it comes to working with physical material. Jana Rush and RP Boo are my favorite producers.

Is there anything you find yourself obsessively collecting?

Foley samples.

 

Do you differentiate your practice when working in different mediums? Does something like this even matter?

I sort of believe in this with music. Maybe not so much with studio work that gets categorized as visual or conceptual. I do like when a music project is about a genre. I did a music project for several years under a different moniker that of course meandered through a number of genres so I’m a bad point of reference. The last physical release I did with that project was a strange little tape with my friend Vijay Masharani that we labeled pop* music.

Do you think of space and architecture when making your work, or is it more so conceived in its own private setting?

I have more fun making work when I know the space it might be in, but sometimes work just happens and is portable.

 

Does your environment influence your work?

Yes.

What was the last show you saw that stuck out to you?

Tina Zavitsanos at Artists Space last year.

 

What is it that you think might initially draw you towards a work of art?

I want to be unable to categorize it, I want to feel like it’s flirting with me.

Do you have any rituals when entering the studio?

No.

 

What is something that you’ve always wanted to do and are working towards achieving?

I would love to do a radio show one day. Mark Leckey and Martine Syms are my artist/radio show idols. You two will always be famous, luv you girls xo

 

Interview conducted and edited by Liam Owings