ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is about the end of the world, or more specifically, how we never stop fearing it. On January 1, 2000, people believed that planes would fall from the sky because of an error in a line of code. Although planes stayed up, this anxiety about technological failure and societal collapse never went away. Today, news media outlets and internet culture keep antagonizing these fears: It just kept finding new subjects - the 2008 economic crash, which showed what unchecked corporate and political power can do to a system everyone depended on, and now the algorithm-fed question of whether AI is the end of the world as we know it. This anxiety feeds my interdisciplinary practice and research.

The systems perpetuating these fears run on information, so I use information as material. My practice works like an algorithm; it consumes, digests, and reinterprets way too much content, usually through a 2 A.M. Wikipedia rabbit hole. I pull from niche internet culture, technological systems, and the industrial conditions of capitalism, merging ideas that don’t have a logical connection, or sometimes any connection at all. The work comes from what happens when those things collide and are taken out of context.

My sculptures and installations are about hybridization. What happens when things that seem like opposites are impossible to separate? In my work, technology, capitalism, and popular culture are inextricable and codependent. They feed each other, and the systems built to advance human progress also build the conditions for their own failure. Doom media asks us to pick a side, but I am defiant. I am more interested in what happens when both are true, and what emerges when contradictions collide, or hell, even when the whole damn thing eats itself. 

Plastiglomerates are a good way to understand this. This man-made mineral forms when melted plastic fuses with sand, sediment, shells, and other materials, producing something that exists outside the scope of rock or trash. My sculptures function in a similar way. I merge together organic and synthetic, fact and fiction, natural and artificial until they become something else entirely. I see hybridization as a queer action, a way of bringing things together that aren't supposed to belong and seeing what happens when they do. My sculptures do not propose a resolution to these contradictions; if anything, they complicate them further. They hold technological progress and catastrophe at the same time. 

That hybridization doesn't stop with ideas or materials. It continues through the process of making. I use digital fabrication because I’m interested in the limits of the machine. From the Y2K millennium bug to the current AI panic, fears run on code and data, and digital fabrication lets me build objects out of those same materials. It’s also a small version of what I’m afraid of. In 1996, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded less than a minute after launch because its software tried to fit a number into a space too small to hold it. It didn’t break; it obeyed. Every time I send a file to a machine, I’m trusting that what’s on the screen will survive contact with the real world. In a digital environment, a model has no weight, heat, or gravity. Once an object leaves it, it has to contend with the conditions of the physical world.

My current series, Lizard Person, explores the hybridization of human and nonhuman bodies through conspiracy culture. When I was younger, I had to have my tonsils removed a second time because they grew back. A failed surgery left enough tissue behind to regrow. Some species of lizard do this on purpose. They voluntarily detach their tails to escape danger. At the site of injury, cells begin to reorganize to build a new one. Unlike the original, which has vertebrae, the tail grows around cartilage. While it resembles the original, it is not an exact reconstruction, but something produced from the information that remains. The work in Lizard Person investigates the body through digital environments, where it is removed from its physical form and reconstructed through data.

Conspiracy theories grow in a similar way. Anxiety and government skepticism cause information to mutate. The myth of lizard people, creatures imagined to conceal a nonhuman identity beneath human skin, started in occult beliefs and speculative fiction. It later became entangled with New World Order paranoia and the suspicion that hidden political elites control society. Online, these anxieties take on a life of their own, turning facts into something almost unrecognizable.

While I sit here waiting for the end of the world, the anxieties that sustain our fear of a nuclear apocalypse continue to run on code and data. My interdisciplinary practice makes material cultural moments of impending doom while exposing their infrastructure. Through digital fabrication, I collect and hybridize information and media that fuel these fears, creating sculpture that competes for survival beyond the screen. Conspiracy theories mutate, bodies regenerate, and technology carries the capacity for innovation and self-annihilation. Each apocalypse grows from whatever the last one left behind. This is the paradox of the Anthropocene: we are living through the consequences of the system we created, knowing full well they might end us all.