Biggie and Shortie Revised

Biggie:

I grew up in an oil town in the deserts of West Texas - a town that experienced crime waves with economic booms. It’s a place that bends to the vicious cyclical nature of commodity and crash, where more money means more pregnant kids, more violence, more backhanded opportunities and the strain on already fragile relationships between people of different races and genders. Pumpjacks and powerlines, rows and stacks of dollar bills, were the only things that rose above the barren surface of the earth, which I once regarded as a for-profit wasteland. As I have grown older, I have begun to see the desert, to find value in it, and to question man’s complex relationship to industrial lands like the kind I come from. My understanding of global social systems continues to grow and change, inspired by a passion for truth. Living in such a transitional and pivotal time, known as the Anthropocene, I feel compelled to expose the chain links between the industrial power structures that moved us here and the people who carried them on their backs. There is no point at which industry ends and man begins. They have built up and within each other like a scab absorbing a bandage, unsustainable progress suspended in liminal time, waiting for the inevitable and painful repercussions.

In my studio, objects are born from pain waiting, frustration, exhaustion, and the desire to challenge both my understanding and dialogue with the world around me. Using ceramics, wood and metal I create figures and landscapes that mimic the dysfunction and destruction of Anthropocentric relationships while simultaneously questioning the systems that created them. I make work within the context of understanding artists as seekers and gatherers of knowledge, stories and communities. My current work exists in the realms of discomfort and heartache - but does not abandon the viewer there, it populates the space with them. It is the quiet of a dry river bed, of a forest without trees, of abandoned buildings and floating plastic bags- the quiet of a moment where viewers are given the opportunity to relinquish their comfortable blindness, and see the world as it is.

Shortie: I grew up in an oil town in the deserts of West Texas - a town that experienced crime waves with economic booms. It’s a place that bends to the vicious cyclical nature of commodity and crash, where more money means more pregnant kids, more violence, more backhanded opportunities and the strain on already fragile relationships between people of different races and genders. As I have grown older, my understanding of global social systems has grown and changed and instilled in me a passion for truth. Living in such a transitional and pivotal time, known as the Anthropocene, I feel compelled to expose the chain links between the industrial power structures that moved us here and the people who carried them on their backs. There is no point at which industry ends and man begins. They have built up and within each other like a scab absorbing a bandage, unsustainable progress suspended in liminal time, waiting for the inevitable and painful repercussions.

In my studio, objects are born from pain waiting, frustration, exhaustion, and the desire to challenge both my understanding and dialogue with the world around me. Using ceramics, wood and metal I create figures and landscapes that mimic the dysfunction and destruction of Anthropocentric relationships while simultaneously questioning the systems that created them. My current work exists in the realms of discomfort and heartache. It is the quiet of a dry river bed, of a forest without trees, of abandoned buildings and floating plastic bags- the quiet of a moment where viewers are given the opportunity to relinquish their comfortable blindness, and see the world as it is.