Prairie Piece (2024), Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX)
The installation showcases a vibrant green LED light display along the front windows of the Nasher Sculpture Center, custom video screens in powder-coated steel casings, a ramp that leads to animations inspired by Robert Smithson’s unrealized Dallas-Fort Worth Airport projects (1966-67), a short documentary-style video on local artist Tino Ward collecting trash in the Dallas Floodway, and a takeaway publication centered on the George W. Bush Native Texas Park presented in a artist made display.
Prairie Piece (2024), Artist Publication
The essay accompanying the exhibition navigates the confluence of biological and political ecologies of the Texas Blackland Praire, embracing what Robert Smithson described as the "contradictions that inhabit our landscapes." It takes us across variegated terrains: the Native Texas Park at the George W. Bush Library, Smithson's unrealized Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (DFW) proposals, and the Dallas Floodway, where Tino Ward collects debris from prairie runoff. By weaving together metaphor and artifice, the text seeks to approach an understanding of place within the Metroplex's vast and hollowed-out prairie landscape.
Prairie Piece Performance Lecture (2024)
A supplemental performance lecture that exapnds on ideas in the exhibition and essay. Read by: Tino Ward, Adrienne Lichliter-Hines, Tamara Johnson, and Darly Meador with audio/visual accompaniment. For full version click here.
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Press for Prairie Piece
The Modern Art Notes Podcast (Tyler Green)
Ghost Stream (2023), Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX)
In November 2023, Tamara Johnson and I were commissioned to lead a guided walk for Mary Miss's installation, Stream Trace: Dallas Branch Crossing (2023), which spans from the Nasher Sculpture Center to the outfalls at the Trinity River in the Design District. Miss's Stream Trace is a site-specific sculpture that traces the course of a hidden stream flowing beneath the Nasher Sculpture Center. The project commences within the museum's garden walls with a series of reflective X's on posts and extends into neighboring communities through these participatory walks.
For our part, we curated a series of designated stops along the path. These stops serve as pivotal points for in-depth discussions regarding Miss's project and its broader implications in the context of Dallas. Additionally, we designed a takeaway map and composed an accompanying essay, delving deeper into the themes of buried histories and hidden infrastructures.
Sky, Lake, Glow, Thunder, Air, Water, Mountain, and Ground. (2022), All the Sudden (Austin, TX)
"Sky, Lake, Glow, Thunder, Air, Water, Mountain, and Ground" is a site-sensitive multimedia sculpture that combines live performance with various media elements, including live video, animations, projections, lighting design, and sound. The structure is a hybridized stage equipped with streaming cameras and a small screening area with bleacher seating. It features a video loop (approximately 10 minutes long) showcasing documentation of the regional landscape where elemental forms from the I-Ching can be found (sky, lake, glow, thunder, air, water, mountain, and ground). The footage reveals complex landscapes filled with artifacts, embodying resilience and potential—a space open to transformation, welcoming wild seeds, and the accommodation of flow. This sculpture was initiated from a conversation with "All the Sudden" and responds to the ethos of the artist-run "DIY" project, reflecting its adaptable and inclusive "yes and…" spirit.
On December 10, 2022, performer Taylor Shields performed live readings from the “She-Ching” or The Book of Changes. Through a series of 10 readings, Shield presented open prompts to the exhibition audience along with choreographed music, lights, and her custom-made animations.
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Press for Sky, Lake, Glow, Thunder, Air, Water, Mountain, and Ground
Number (Macaella Gray and Zoe Roden)
"Natural Light" (2023) is a site-specific installation created for the “Château Show” in the historic Aldredge House in East Dallas. This installation features a cooler equipped with a custom-made solar generator that powers an ad-hoc multimedia setup, including a tape loop, found footage of a dirt devil, and a lighting scheme. Atop a C-stand, a screen displays footage of children playing in a whirlwind, sourced from a VHS of amateur storm chasers. The sculpture's solar system is woven throughout the house, extending from upstairs to the front yard, and is connected to a pair of solar panels mounted on a modified hand-truck. The solar power system's components, including hand trucks and the cooler, serve as sculptural reinterpretations of found DIY solutions.
LagoonoogaL (2022), Tarleton State University
LagoonoogaL reconfigures the TSU art gallery with construction sheeting — enveloping a centralized space with a makeshift corridor (lazy river) leading to a secondary chamber.
The vinyl pool bottom, alligator, multi-screen videos, and soundscape speak to water and the supporting vena cava systems of infrastructure. The screens showcase 🔁 documentation of the regional landscape: A leisure-filled, turquoise lagoon sits in high contrast to the surrounding sod and brown, a wave pool churns behind a highway wall, the uncanny offerings of a water treatment plant feed back into a river, etc.
Proposal/layout image: TSU’s gallery is one of the strangest spaces I’ve ever been asked to install an artwork. Much of the installation came from thinking about how to create a space that allowed someone to have an architectural experience.
Corridor with looping video (:30sec)
Alligator sculpture: polychromed plywood, speaker, screen, media player, custom wiring, looping video (2min40sec)
"Recent Landscapes" ex ovo projects Dallas, TX -
This sculpture )(steel, wood, resin, screens, concrete, looping video (9:45sec), various components), measuring approx 12’ x 16’ x 10’, is an artist-made pavilion that blends elements of a carport and a front porch, featuring custom cast motifs. It shares its title, "Recent Landscapes," with the exhibition itself, paying homage to the influential 1975 photography exhibition "New Topographics," which emphasized the human-made impact in landscape. Through my work, I aim to extend this legacy by exploring a modern world where the built environment has outgrown the natural one, with technology playing an ever-present role.
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As part of my exhibition for "Recent Landscapes" at ex ovo, the sculpture "Fountain (Wheeler Creek)" is made from foil, wood, bronze, pewter, photographs in various formats, steel, digital tuners, video mixer, vinyl, and various components. While working on the work for this exhibition, I was reading Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack and became fascinated by his ideas of ambient infrastructure and wanted to make a sculpture that would reflect ideas of “the local.”
The Bank of America Plaza (which can be seen from the parking lot of ex ovo) has a specialized television broadcast floor located near the top of the building. This floor houses a multitude of telecommunications and broadcasting equipment, including transmitters and antennas used by local television and radio stations. The height and location of the building make it an ideal spot for these broadcasting facilities, as it provides unobstructed signals to reach the entire Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. The sculpture was positioned in a way to collect that material, and used a video mixer to cycle through the content. The walls were wrapped in aluminum foil to try and block peripheral signals and capture better reception from the building. Antennas are integrated into the sculpture and their forms are sourced from found DIY solutions.
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Press for Recent Landscapes:
Dallas Morning News (Lauren Smart)
Baked Potato Essay
Documentation of an essay composed for the closing of "Recent Landscapes" at ex ovo projects in Dallas, Texas "...not as an explanation of the work, or the show, but as a vehicle for an expansion on the ideas." A baked potato bar serving foil wrapped potatoes coincided with the reading, in reference to the walls of the exhibition being partially covered in aluminum foil.
Video Box wood, vinyl, raspberrypi, screen, looping video. These sculptures are part of a series of video boxes or video objects containing paired footage and wrapped photography. Custom-made battery-powered media players loop the footage continuously within the interiors. They draw inspiration from the intimate origins of early cinema, such as the Kinetoscope, which offered a one-on-one viewing experience. These objects are inherently designed for peering, encompassing scenes ranging from mundane observations to voyeuristic glimpses.
The Sculpture School Reader (290 pages) is a primer on the regional landscape and built environments that surround and hold Sweet Pass Sculpture Park. The reader is not intended as a complete portrait, or even an exceptionally coherent one, but more of a collage that aims to gather up some high-level starting points for Dallas history (from the trivial to the problematic), site responsive sculpture theory, and the Texas Blackland Prairie. Sweet Pass Sculpture School, 2021.
Sweet Pass Sculpture Park organized Sculpture School in 2021-2022 to generate site-responsive projects at our exhibition space. For the first cohort, we focused on the Texas Blackland Prairie, the most endangered large ecosystem in North America, an ancient tall grass ecosystem with less than 1% of remnant habitat remaining. Sculpture School led a group of six artists on a broad survey of this lost prairie while exploring the embedded histories, hidden natures, and infrastructures in the region. (Sous les pavés, la prairie!). As part of the program, we toured managed prairie preserves, native plant gardens, designed landscapes, and artificial wetlands—surveying a ghost ecology with archaeologists, architecture critics, landscape designers, local activists, historians, and public artists. Our aim was to examine how Dallas' construction has shaped its surrounding ecology and how the city incorporates nature into its tangled mass. The artists presented their responsive projects to the public in 2022.
Simulated walkthrough of the LOCII+O 1 installation environment
Feed 2 (click for excerpt)
LOCII+O was an experimental media event. Designed to function in a mutually coordinated manner, the installation invited collaboration in the form of live collage, commentary, and video processing. In concert with these various points of entry and output, performer and actor Matthew Maher acted as our guide through classic action films, exploring their tropes and ruminating on themes of hyper-masculinity, surveillance, the American landscape, and its media apparatus. Special guests included Allison Klion, Tamara Johnson, Tino Ward, and Zak Loyd
The Philosophy of Goo 2020 (13min17sec) is a video that emerged from conversations that started with my wife, artist Tamara Johnson, and her use of the term “goo” to describe the materiality of her sculptural practice. This layered video employs a first-person memoir style to untangle the variegated qualities of this ineffable and precarious material. Weaving together popular culture and documentary footage, the essay speaks to larger issues of body politics, feminine maintenance, family relationships, and the processes of an artist. This project was made with support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in conjunction with Wassaic Projects and debuted in 2020 in Wassaic, NY.
Next Exit (2019) was a co-organized group exhibition in collaboration with ex ovo gallerist Allison Klion, featuring the works of artists Harris Chowdhary, Finn Jubak, and Jonathan Molina-Garcia. The exhibition's genesis involved establishing a reading group, a series of discussions, and studio visits, leading to the development of the showcased artworks. My specific role in this endeavor included contributing to the exhibition's design creating a series of ramps to facilitate the movement between the displayed artworks. Underneath these ramps, a small cinema showcased a video created with Klion and her father, Howard, who provided a tour of "the big houses" in Dallas.
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