I guess the thing that motivates me is like the idea of having a really yeah, I don't know like a shared experience with somebody, somebody I don't know, through this object that I made.
Yeah, I think the idea of kind of looking, looking together has always been something really nice.
I mean, I think we all live in time and we have to negotiate it.
It's the material of our lives.
Yeah yeah, it's not a yeah, I don't know.
When I was a student, alongside art, I was also really into a philosophy of science, and it's really a very interesting yeah, philosophical subtopic like philosophy of time, and there's yeah, I think it's a, Yeah still a very interesting and ongoing debate.
Yeah, thing i was into in high school other than art was chemistry, and so i, you know, was with my parents and, and the car i don't know and, and we were talking about yeah, my future plans, and then i was like, maybe i should go and study to be a chemical engineer.
And then they were like oh, you're gonna get bored with that, or You should just do art, and then all of the things you're interested in you can fold into your artwork, which is a very enlightened answer from a parent.
I grew up in the US and then, shortly after I finished grad school, I got a grant to travel from my undergrad and at the same time I was invited to do a show in Brussels.
And I came to Brussels and I really fell in love with it here and I just decided to stay here.
When I first came here, I was just really immediately welcomed by the art scene here and I made a community kind of right away, and I just found that it was very easy and I mean, I also had a gallery here and I had kind of some projects in Europe to work on and yeah, it was just easier than going back to LA, honestly.
So I just uh decided to yeah, just keep um yeah, keep being here and making artwork.
These were also works that we made for that show too, and they were like these kinds of uh, uh keyhole kind of cast.
So but yeah, I was kind of making all these sort of uh like artificial kind of stone materials.
It's not stone, it's like basically made out of like studio dust, like stuff mixed together with resins and yeah, artificial plasters and things like that.
That kind of give it this stone.
When I first came to art school, I started off maybe thinking that I would go into painting, although the school I went to didn't have departments you could really do whatever you wanted.
But then I kind of gravitated into the photo department because the photo professors were really the most interesting and challenging and nicest ones and they kind of adopted me into, And so then I was really just concentrating on photo for the rest of the time.
First of all, photography is really the most democratic art medium.
I mean, everybody does it all the time.
When I was in grad school.
It was the first time that I had a studio to work in really, and so I started to make kind of objects that were sort of props for photographs.
I think every sculptor also has their own definitions of what sculpture is, what it can do and yeah, what makes it different than any regular object.
You know, and at least the way that i've sort of come to understand sculpture, it's really about the forces that are at work and the thing itself, you know and, And photography it's the limitations of it.
If you photograph really with a lens, then you can only really capture something in one state of being.
Sculptures are vulnerable to the effects of physics?
Yeah, and photography, yeah.
It's not because it's in yeah, only this finite space, basically that you kind of witness, and it's been removed from one time and placed into another time.
So this is kind of like how yeah, how the sculptures are before they're cast.
So this is like yeah, kind of this quite random railway interchange, but I think that the overall geometry of it is just really beautiful and like the particular curves of it.
And so yeah, I chose this kind of tiny fragment from the map because of this form.
And then when you cast it, it kind of completely transforms into something else.
Thank you.
I think calendars are really interesting because they say a lot about the culture that made them.
And I got really into this 13-month calendar that was heavily promoted by George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, and they used it internally at Kodak until like 1989 or something like that.
There was this international fixed calendar society and they were lobbying congress and the league of nations that there yeah, would be 13 months with 28 days, and every holiday would always fall on the exact same day of every year and and there would be one day off, basically.
But but the whole, The whole thing seems very logical and, of course, nobody wanted this and nobody wants to live in this kind of efficiency driven society.
It's just totally absurd.
And I think that's what I really loved about this.
You know that I love the failure of it.
Actually, you know, and what it says about you know yeah, about the society that we live in.
The form of it is based on this kind of fan that's used for identifying the color of egg yolks.
Farmers would feed yeah, chicken feed with some kind of supplement in it or something that would adjust the yolk color to the client preferences, and it's.
I mean, it's been used since like the 50s or something, but this is still the normal way of making egg yolks.
It's really, it's really disturbing, and yeah.
So i saw this object and then i decided to recreate it in in egg tempera, which was the first way that i learned how to paint when I first came to art school, and after that I started to make other kinds of works that were in using the same kind of fan form, and one thing that I came on to was these kind of color charts for chemical, chemical contaminants in water.
So you have these kinds of little colored vials and you have to like match your sample to them.
And so the colored glass I painted to match these kinds of liquid test vials basically.
These were the molds that I used for these pill sculptures that I was telling you about.
The motifs are from different buildings, like from Hoffmann, La Roche or from Novartis, the two main pharma companies in Basel.
Yeah, kind of based on these pills that I saw in the Pharma Museum in the city.
I mean, it's the main industry in the city.
Maybe this one is also.
I should say like It looks very abstract, but it's actually like a.
It's taken from the kind of Google map of the city of Basel.
So this is the Rhine here, and then this is a bridge going over it.
And then this is like, circle is like where the, pharma campus of Novartis is.
And so it kind of became this sort of constructivist looking kind of geometry here.
I mean, I always want to have a really physical reaction and for people to yeah, to feel transported and to feel I don't know, to feel like they're floating or something.
That's all of the time that I'm working and preparing everything for the space.
That's really what I'm hoping for is this kind of sensation in your stomach that you get.
I don't know when a child getting a piggyback ride or something.
I mean, I want art to kind of be able to really give you that sensation also, but through pure visuality actually.
