Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My work treats contemporary media as a quarry, an accumulation of techniques and habits from which architectural thinking draws its forms. It prefigures the world by giving phenomena structure, shaping how we understand the built environment. Perspective in the fifteenth century was both a technique of intersection rays and a philosophical instrument, an expression of Renaissance notions of rationalism, individualism, and ocularcentrism. Our current representational frameworks are similarly double. They are made of lines of code that carry assumptions about the position of subjects in space. My work mines the hidden mechanisms in these systems to construct new architectural languages. Treated this way, media becomes an analytical device that allows me to track the effects buildings have on their contexts.

While At Headlands

California has sixteen climate zones. The California Energy Commission doubled the number of zones that the International Energy Conservation Code established for the US to ensure that buildings represent the state’s climate diversity and to give architecture and construction industries accurate efficiency standards. Through these laws, new construction grows efficient and cheaper to operate. Yet, greater material, economic, and social disparities will arise between those who live in what is new and what already exists. While at the Headlands, I will build full-size wall and roof assemblies to test the thermal and spectral properties of low-cost retrofits. I’ll pay closer attention to windows and doors, where boundaries between conditioning and wilding are most evident.