Decorations and party gear act as charms or gris-gris to current culture. Balloons and garlands conjure up a transcendent escape. They make the party by magically transmitting us to another place entirely; one where every day cares and woes can fall away. They signal a momentary hiatus from everyday life and order us to enjoy ourselves. In this way décor can be magical.

Drawing from sources as varied as New Age and occult practice, sci-fi illustrations, B movie sets, mineral formations, grow rooms, and cheap plastic holiday décor, my work at once questions and confirms the existence of the metaphysical in everyday life. I focus on the escape offered by everyday objects such as candy, toys, and holiday and party decorations, re-imagining these everyday commodities to create objects, images, and experiences that the viewer can get lost in. By creating a synesthesia of taste, touch, and vision I hope not only to draw attention to the transformative objects that surround us but also to question their value. The objects I use are cheap, wasteful, and unnecessary. I attempt to elevate them and bring attention to their value in order to question the hold they have over us. By changing the context of everyday objects, depicting natural forms with decidedly unnatural materials, and practicing magic with mundane merchandise, I conflate real and artificial, natural and manmade, cheap and valuable. In this way I question each.

Through my revelry in the supersaturated colors and luscious forms local to my materials as well as through my process and subject matter—quartz crystals, pendulum divination, cults, charms, parties, drug dens, and environments for meditation and escape—I take a positive stance. I make a conscious effort to believe completely in the power of everyday leisure objects to transform us, carry us away, and transcend ordinary consciousness. Crystals really do funnel energy, Easter really does renew, that new product really will change my life. The materials and forms I choose, however, also tend to lend a covert skepticism to the work. Just like my sculptures, installations, and images, there is something hollow, surface, and unreal about both magic and consumerism’s claims of self-actualization through objecthood.  It is this conjunction of surface artificiality and deep meaningful experience that I aim to understand.

So my work interrogates the complex relationship between belief and skepticism, desire and disappointment, real and unreal. I elevate everyday objects, utilize supernatural and pseudoscientific phenomena, and combine natural forms with manmade materials to address issues of authenticity and value. Employing a lighthearted, perhaps even visually flippant approach I ultimately aim to leave viewers with a better—or at least different—understanding of their own personal relationship to consumerism, nature, and belief.