My site-responsive, modular wall installations explore the adaptability, impermanence and interdependence of forms, color, and structures. Each installation takes one geometric unit as its subject made from folded hand-colored paper. These units are then layered and hung on the wall, creating an improvised and ephemeral installation. The geometry is a structure for building relationships, creating surprising and new groupings as they bleed into and interact with their neighboring units both through form and color. The final installations are site-responsive and unique, and their improvised structures stress the infinite interactions within their own infrastructures. Each successive iteration is an opportunity to reveal the new temporary interdependent relationships that are created between material, form, reflected color, and the site itself.

The visual and formal relationships in my work are also connected to my interests and experience in classical music, martial arts, racial identity, and community building.

Many of the qualities of music – ephemerality, performance, and the transformation of abstract ideas into physical sensations – permeate my work. Even the structure of my installations mimic the way a fugue’s subject is transposed, inverted, and folded into itself. I use repetition not so much as a compositional device, but more as a way to explore and develop the possibilities of the unit. Or, to borrow Glenn Gould’s description of Bach’s late fugues, to “give the impression of an infinitely expanding universe.” 

I’ve studied Jeet Kune Do and Filipino martial arts for over a decade. Dan Inosanto, my martial arts teacher, stresses being adaptable and how one’s personal martial arts system must constantly be re-evaluated and re-imagined, lessons that have made their way into my artwork and life interests. The moment-to-moment problem solving during a sparring session of reacting and adapting to what your opponent is doing is supported by hours of intentional drilling of techniques. The discipline and repetition required to form the foundation for improvisation and adaptability both in music and martial arts are not unlike the labor required in my work before it can culminate in a temporary structure. 

I am skeptical of essentializing or even searching for purity in racial, national, and cultural identity. Our individual identities are a unique combination of the constantly shifting relationships between one’s lived experience, environment, and personal journey. These identities shift and adapt over time as we navigate different social contexts, as we influence and are influenced by other people, and as we grow individually and collectively. I see links to the ways in which my work can be constantly deconstructed and rebuilt with the way I think about the instability of individual and collective identity.

In my work as an arts community builder I’ve found that I’m attracted to structures that are designed to expand, structures that imply horizontal and emergent growth patterns rather than something that is vertical and guided by a singular vision. The communities that I’ve helped build allow for a multitude of voices working together as equals, each of us aware of what the other is doing as we cooperatively move towards our goals. For whatever reason, my art work, my organizing work, and even many of my hobbies are closely related to adrienne maree brown’s concept of “emergent strategy… the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” My work is ultimately about the instability and adaptability of structures, and the endless potential to imagine and build new structures and relationships not only visually and formally in the work, but also within ourselves and the world we inhabit.