“A meteorite crossed the sky, its trajectory passing in front of the Sun; its fluid and fiery envelope for an instant acted as a filter to the Sun’s rays, and all of a sudden the world was immersed in a light never seen before. Purple chasms gaped at the foot of orange cliffs, and my violet hands pointed to the flaming green meteor while a thought for which words did not yet exist tried to burst from my throat…” 

 Italo Calvino, “Without Colors”

Statement for Spartan Shop:

July 2022

I made this body of work right after returning from a residency in Guadalajara in the spring and early summer of 2022. While in Mexico, I read Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues, a book of essays that explore exile, motherhood, aging, and the role of art in life. Her writing compelled me to think about how my work is permeated by human relations, for while objects stand apart from us, they are also vehicles held together by the weave of human and non-human life. My vessels are reflections and intuitive dialogues with the ecology of Southern California. They are imbued with conversations with my grandma, egrets feeding at the beach, heat waves, bare feet in sand, wildfire smoke. I wonder in making them what lives they will go on to have, and how they will be wrapped up in new social and ecological contexts that I will never know.

The revaluation of values is the general form of innovation: here the true or the refined that is regarded as valuable is devalorized, while that which was formerly considered profane, alien, primitive, or vulgar, and thus valueless, is valorized. As a revaluation of values, innovation is an economic operation. The demand for the new thus falls into the category of the economic constraints determinant of the life of society as a whole. An economy is trade with values within certain value hierarchies. This trade is required of all who wish to participate in the life of a society, of which culture is a part. Here the customary classification of values as material or spiritual is irrelevant: the claim that a cultural product has an ideal value that does not correspond to its material value in fact never means anything but that the product is overvalued or undervalued ‘materially’, and contains that implicit demand that we bring its material value into line with its ideal value.

Boris Groys, On the New