My work is largely comprised of watercolor crayon and reductive wax paintings on decorative plate glass, as well as intricate sculptures made from found objects and junk store items. With both mediums, I’ve sought to represent aesthetic over-stimulation that leads to expansiveness of imagination and wonder, much like that experienced in childhood when one visits a candy shop. As a child, I had a strong desire to see all colors and textures at once, including colors never seen before, to experience a kind of environmental utopia. With this project, I am setting out to re-capture this feeling of simultaneous intense desire and satisfaction. My artistic influences include Mike Kelly, Shane Hope, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Gaudi, Nick Cave, and Tanya Schultz, all of whom create works that are highly intricate, colorful, and meticulously ornate. Like myself, these artists explore our relationships with innocence, consumerism, fantasy worlds and excess.

The use of holograms, projections, and photogrammetric replicas of original sculptures and paintings will further enforce feelings of overstimulation and surreality, while calling to mind Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real (Baudrillard)”. Here, the copy that has been reproduced beyond recognition replaces reality, much like our childhood sense of desire for the fantastic becomes replaced by consumerism, and our capacity for wonder and limitations of reality constrict.

The geodesic dome references Plato’s Cave, or concept of a limited and shrinking reality which merely provides distorted reflections of what is, and a fraction of a sliver of a window into the expansive nature and true possibilities within our world: “In every way, then, such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects.” Finally, the sensation evoked from the Huggins frequency will best be achieved within the acoustic environment of the dome. The cave-like structure compels the viewer to recall that the possibilities and limitations of reality originate within them, as reality is merely a construct defined by the limitations of our own imaginations.