Produced collaboratively with Namulen Bayarsaihan, Orhontuul Banzragch, Bat-Orgil Batulga, Dashdondog Badam (and family), Saruul Artist Residency, Selenge, Mongolia, 2019. We brought manufactured turf to a nomadic herding family’s home on common grazing lands, borrowed their table, and used it to ceremoniously offer the sod to their animals.
This is a video installation work, in which an American field research scientist character performs experiments to prove the insubstantiality of political barriers from a natural law perspective. The video was produced on location at the fence on the closed border between Armenia and Turkey.
I did a residency at the Nest, a program of the Institute for Contemporary Art in Yerevan, Armenia, in the summer of 2018. While there I worked on a social engagement/experimental documentary project, collecting stories of indigenous foods and the cultural effects of displacement from homelands, collaborating with an Armenian diaspora food historian, Mari Firkatian.
I performed a 26 mile walk, which I have mapped out here, circumambulating nine times counter-clockwise around the Mission Church in the present-day Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, the traditional homeland of the Massachusett people.
This was a project I organized with Ted Efremoff. We built this boat in Willimantic, Connecticut, in three weeks. It is a wooden lapstrake canoe with a canvas sail. It was built with the help and participation of about 100 people from the local area.
I’ve been out riding my tricycle a lot. I found it back in 2004. It was in pieces. I fixed it up, added some bells and whistles, and started riding. I like it, it gets me moving. Doing it. You know, getting into it, active.
Sam Ekwurtzel and I made a sauna by the lake at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007.
In 2005, I worked 40 hours a week at a museum for five weeks, tending to a film I had installed, talking to people about the film and whatever else came up, playing music, writing, making prints, etc.
This book was printed at the UConn Printshop with Gus Mazzocca’s offset press in 2005. Offset and embosograf, staple bound pamphlet. Edition of 500. 4.25″ x 5.5″. This book was part of A Work of Art.
This was a banner drop I did on a parking garage in 2003, trying to create a blank, neutral, unspecified, and therefore disturbing message. I was thinking about and documenting the way American flags were being displayed on overpasses, construction sites, homes, and gas stations around that time, as the Terror War was getting going after 9/11/01. I made a short super 8 film about it. This action of hanging the banner was an attempt to complicate the conversations that were going on, which seemed to be all about choosing sides. The phrase “These Colors Don’t Run” has been used as a patriotic slogan for many years, in reference to national integrity and pride as embodied in an enduring, bright flag. My flag was colorless, blank, white on white.