I just had my first solo show of sculpture and wall art at Cloud Tree and it was one of the more gratifying accomplishments of my career. I was lucky enough to receive a grant from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin to put the show on and am not only grateful to the city but also extremely pleased at the level of funding the city has been putting towards the arts in recent years. This is the second such grant I have received. The first was for the group art show Vessel which I curated in 2015. Below are some shots of the work from I Am You as well as the artist statement.

I Am You - Reflections on Connection and Isolation

Welcome to Cloud Tree and thank you so much for coming. Though I have always considered my furniture and decor designs to be sculptural in nature it wasn’t until 2015 that I began to make my first pieces of sculpture and decorative wall art.

For some time now all my decor designs have been done in a resin and grain matched series, typically via solid wood laminations. As I began to break them into separate pieces during the fabrication process it struck as a beautiful metaphor for something I had already been meditating on which is the idea of being an individual and yet part of a greater whole. Through various media including podcasts, ted talks, books, music and more the idea kept popping up again and again. I began to work this theme into some sculpture last year and decided it could serve as the energetic underpinning of a body of work for my first solo show.

Being a person who likes to see all sides of an issue, I thought I would explore the existential isolation of being human as well. I often like holding diametric ideas as both true. Though we are in essence, at least i believe, intrinsically connected to everyone and everything including the infinite, we bear the burden of complete isolation on a journey that no one can experience but ourselves. Again in a diametric way I find this fact both terrifying and beautifully special.

One area of the connection theme I chose to explore is the idea that we simply cannot do it alone. The sculpture Eureka embodies this the best as it represents that all great ideas have been built by the whole, one spark inspiring the next in an energetic thread that can be traced back as far as one would like to take it, even to the primordial darkness and mystery that stirred in the very beginning. In the spirit of this I would like to thank the countless people who have inspired, taught and helped me on my own journey of realizing my dreams this far. I simply could not have done it with out you.

From top - Meteroic , Macrocosm and Cotton Mouth

I Understand You Feel Alone But That Isn't Helping/ The Seven (Bad?) Behaviors

BDJ