Stills from Sounding Board (with R.E.H. Gordon and Jillian Soto, December 2011) and Open Book (with Yasi Ghanbari, January 2012) from the project Every Acconci in the Video Data Bank, a collaboration of Alicia Chester and Andrea Slavik. See link for details and updates to the project.

Translation (2009-2011) is a sculptural installation based on the symbolism of forests and pine trees. The title derives from Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” in which he describes translation as shooting arrows into the heart of a forest to find the echo of the original text. I am transposing his metaphoric image onto the relationship between representation and referent while retaining echoes of fairytales and mysticism. Wood and pine trees are construction materials and are represented in images and models. The installation involves a deferral or displacement of the original, or perhaps original copies; they are a mixture of the present fake and the absent or constructed referent, forming larger compositions from multiple, similar parts: difference in repetition, sameness in multiplicity, the forest and its copies.

Installation photos from the Koehnline Museum of Art, Des Plaines, IL, October 6–December 2, 2011.

Instant Duration, 2010, inkjet prints and sound, 22"x33" each

Instant Duration is a portrait diptych exhibited with stereo sound recorded using a shotgun microphone during the photo shoots. The left channel corresponds with the left portrait, and the right channel corresponds with the right portrait. The "instantaneity" of the fraction of a second captured in photographs plays against the full duration of the photo shoots, in which you hear the models and photographer interacting, the camera shutter, and ambient sound. Instant Duration is a conceptual collaboration with radio producer Michael De Bonis, who recorded and mixed the sound.

Installation photos from Disruptive Stillness, Jean Paul Slusser Gallery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, January 7-28, 2011.