I have always been a bit of a dreamer. Intrigued by the contrast between the plan and the real, I ponder the possibilities through visiting and exploring local and global identities, examining the ways people and communities plan for and respond to change.

In my current installations and drawings, I often use community-based research as a starting point for work that forms a dialog around local socio-spatial issues. For installations, I travel to specific locales and spend time there not just as a typical artist making work in a residency-like environment, but as a kind of temporary quasi-citizen--facilitating, collecting, sharing, meeting, incorporating the perceptions and creations of local citizens into exhibitions along with making my own interpretations. The process explores the nature of art, folding the plan into real time while replacing the standard exhibition form (fixed, closed, individual) with ones that are open-ended, continual, collaborative.

For me creative play supercedes any typical urban planning process. Individualized, fantastic interpretations are celebrated alongside serious and practical ones, fostering an intentional fragmentary and quixotic amateurism--a lot like life itself--while initiating questions about everydayness, creativity, how and why places act.

In the end the conversation of community-building and creative imagining is the art. It is a process that lends itself to interrogating insider versus outsider perceptions of the local through questions posed about the very firm conclusions we reach about neighborhoods, cities, states, countries...and the ways we go about changing those perceptions.