I never anticipated pursuing my parent’s occupation, which is the valuation of real estate in rural Alaska. However, it is now clear to me how growing up in a small coastal community has informed my artistic practice. As a child, I frequently accompanied my parents on their property inspections, which often resulted in me waiting for them to finish with uncomfortably cold, wet feet. Recently, during my performance of The Production of Stopping, I found myself on an inspection of sorts, as I lingered in a fallow agricultural field muddied by late April showers. I believe it is my familiarity with the wilderness of Alaska that has nurtured my interest in agricultural fields, orchards, and streetscapes as places that both dramatically absorb and transform our actions.

Through my practice I investigate places. While a real estate appraisal is based on the ability to determine similarities between multiple parcels, my interest is in exploiting the specificity of a place through an investigation of the present as well as the past. The research I carry out during the development of a project traverses multiple disciplines. Musical instruments derived from hunting bows, early scientific devices, fire towers, the Boy Scout Handbook, cartography practices, and avalanche rescue schemes have all informed a single work and establish a way of using metaphor to investigate place.

The decision to situate my work in accessible places is an attempt to explore how we differentiate familiar, everyday environments. Throughout much of the country it is not uncommon to see weed-filled parking lots framing abandoned shopping malls. These vacuous lots serve as a persistent reminder of the loss associated with relocating populations. While admiration for the role of an impartial observer remains problematic the novelty of seventeenth century experiments, which once demonstrated that bird, mice, eels, snails, and flies were unable to survive in a vacuum chamber, is gone. In a century that has been distinguished by increasingly devastating disasters, rapidly disappearing sea ice, and the acute consequences of war, stillness is less momentous. My practice exists in the interval between the processes of observation and repair, in an attempt to investigate change.