a Material Witness

                          Select Installations and Public Art

Will Tomorrow Never Come and Locked, Lost, MOCA GA

Will Tomorrow Never Come and Locked, Lost were two large scale installations I created at MOCA GA for the 2018 exhibition, Far From Home: Stories of Refugee Girls. I hand dyed thousands of envelopes and mounted them on the gallery wall to look like the waves that some refugees battle in their search for a new home. I was specifically thinking about the Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar for Bangladesh when I created this work. The second installation, Lost Locked, is about the symbolic importance of keys to refugees. The Palestinian people were some of the earliest to keep the keys to their lost homes with them, though there is almost no hope of return. Keys are now symbolic for many refugees, regardless of ethnicity. Each key hung in this exhibition represented 1,000 refugee girls. The number of refugees in 2018 rivaled the numbers seen after World War II.

The Enchanted Forest of Books, Art on the BeltLine

I was commissioned by the Atlanta BeltLine’s Art on the BeltLine initiative to install a temporary library in the trees on the Kirkwood Spur. The idea was to inspire the community to read books by writers, working outside the traditional canon, in addition to English language classics. I created many paper sculptures from discarded library books and hung them in the trees along a 1/8 of a mile section of the trail; walkers would enter this little used section of the BeltLine and be greeted by a surprise. In addition to the sculptures, purple and green bottles were hung in the trees, each containing a book suggestion, a pencil and blank paper. People could open the bottles and take away a book suggestion and leave their own behind.

Kaleidoscope, Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority

Kaleidoscope was a public art installation that transformed an Atlanta subway car into a moving gallery during the annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography festival. The piece was commissions by Atlanta Celebrates Photography in conjunction with the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA). I photographed Atlanta landmarks and signature events and then turned these images into kaleidoscope patterns that were printed on adhesive material and attached to the floors, walls and ceilings of a MARTA subway car. Passengers were also given toy kaleidoscopes so they could look at the passing city and imagine a transformation of the landscape. Kaleidoscope played on the relationship between transportation systems and efforts to envision a more livable city.