the big questions

This place, this big dead place, is so alive. My appreciation for repetition is mimicked all around me. Subtle repetition, similarity again and again. I find satiating pleasure in the landscape. The white repeats itself over and over again- changing tones, minute by minutes, lit with different forces, reflecting and refracting glows, often fading into a featureless white expanse.

From my perch, the driver’s seat of a 44,000 lb Delta, VAST is the only appropriate word.




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My everyday questions have expanded with the horizon. The biggest: “What does a sustainable life look like for me?” How can I be on a middle path, my veins pulsing with passions, and my body attentively stopped to notice the diesel fumes or to hear nothing, resting snow?

In the past this same question of sustainability meant: “Where should I buy my food? Where should I live? What type of job should I have? What kind of partner will share happiness with me? How can I decrease my environmental footprint?”

But now, this question of sustainability is holistically different. I want to develop a lifestyle that suits me personally. I want to build patterns that instigate spontaneity and surprise—that are built upon flexible poignant change.

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Today, in a low moment of weariness, I found myself thinking, “When I go back to the states I will have to tell people that I have done NOTHING with the past months, with this one long ongoing day of sunlight. Everyone goes to Antarctica!"



Hours later, I laughed at myself realizing that I AM TOASTY! I really have been isolated here. Of course everyone in Antarctica goes to Antarctica. No one I meet here doesn’t.

We are in this together.



My community of intellectual forklift operators, spiritual mechanics, hitchhiking utility technicians, and artistic cargo handlers—we are bound together here on this “harsh” continent; we choose to be without any other option.

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“How can I open myself to life?” In Chicago, I was making artwork about attentiveness, but struggled to step away from my making to enjoy an unstructured, plan-free afternoon. Was I not living a contradiction? I seek to let my art practice be inter-dependent with my daily life. How can I balance my ambition with rest? My direction with wonderment? And most importantly, what experiences do I need to create (and open myself to) in order to teach my body the value of the middle path.


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I ask life questions. I create things figure them out. Sometimes the making is an experience, a moment, a gesture. I guess I just like creating.

While I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, I desired to mimic the artist Kimsooja. (www.Kimsooja.com) Upon a one on one meeting with her I decided I could not mimic her because my work, even my mimicry, needs to come from within myself. Last month, her work came through my body. Instead of becoming a needle weaving together a river of passing people, I became the silence of vastness. I was an embodied a photograph, living stillness.

I want to choose a state of being over achievement. Where does this locate my art in the world, within myself, in life?