My interdisciplinary practice confronts ecological and social change through aerial photography, projected site-specific video projection, sculptures cast in kiln-formed glass from geospatial data, artist-led city walks, and the use of video game engine tools as narrative forms. Much of this artwork begins with the launching of an industrial surveying camera drone, from which I capture miles-long stretches of cities, mountains, and coastlines using photogrammetry datasets combining thousands of images from each site. The work often explores the liminal space between digital imagination and analog ways of making, with a site scan finding multiple expressions as a sculptural scale model annotated with projected video, and also as a data-driven digital twin encountered in metaverse augmented space.

I am interested in the urban geology of lands being built on top of older lands. My own studio was built in 2007 on the site of a 1920 bungalow in a neighborhood that displaced a freed slave community from the 1870s, that itself was built on land stolen from the Muskogee people in 1833.  My immigrant great-grandparents’ home nearby was demolished in 1957 to build the interstate highway.  My work explores these sedimentary layers of maps laid on top of older maps to reconstruct almost-vanished worlds and explore voluntary and involuntary diasporas within American cities. This work explores what truths might be excavated from the whitewashing of official histories and fading collective memory using birdseye aerial camera views, archival photographs, oral histories, maps, and legal records to reconstruct built-over landscapes.

I was an attorney once, it feels like a lifetime ago, and this work finds itself at the uneasy intersection of art, the law, and cartography to craft a narrative of power, place, and advocacy for sustainable change.   I explore how the discourses of law and visual culture both inform and trouble each other. Beginning with the democratic advocacy and research tools I practiced as an environmental lawyer and political organizer, I then employ the tools of photography and cinema as evidence to build an indictment that neither art nor the law could prove on their own.  The resulting work relies on belief, memory and folklore as much as it does imaging, journalism, or evidence-based ways of proving.