I have always been a bit of a dreamer, intrigued by the contrast between the plan and the real. In my current installations and drawings, I examine and ponder the ways people and communities plan for and respond to change. The large-scale drawings are a sort of pseudo-plan for specific places that blur boundaries between what is real and what might be real, drawn in a slow, exacting process that reflects the incremental pace of cooperation and institutionalization (even in the case of a fast-rise city such as Dubai, becoming globally respected as a "destination" happens over generations).

For installations I collaborate with communities as a starting point for work that forms a dialog around local socio-spatial issues. 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 quasi-citizen--facilitating, collecting, sharing, meeting, incorporating the perceptions, dreams, and creations of local residents along with my own interpretations. While folding the plan into real time, this process explores the nature of art itself by replacing the standard exhibition form (fixed, closed, individual) with one that is open-ended, continual, collaborative. Creative play supercedes any typical urban planning process, and 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 creativity, art, local identity, and place.

In all my work, creative spatial imagining and the conversation of the challenges of local and global community-building are 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.