Down to earth in ground and labor; Why is this art? In my studio work I begin with known or recognizable forms and I try to tweak them, bend them or insert secret spaces. This is a long process at first, tedious getting there, remaking a formal vocabulary, reciting shapes and surfaces. It is all for reaching a place where I can play, that is invent. Where I can move away from the familiar and into the unknown . It is these perceptual and cognitive forays that breathe, that are alive on their own, that are emphatically present and affectively charged. They allow me to see things in a new way. They provide for a moment of seeing things afresh; the opportunity to recalibrate perceptual faculties, to adjust/reconfigure one's understanding of and relationship with the larger world. When this takes place within oneself there begins to emerge an idiosyncratic remodeling of all manner of mental constructs: social emotional ethical legal psychological . When this occurs more broadly (at the level of a small collective of willing and able persons) it can have many very positive outcomes: recalibration of various social dynamics (alliances and rivalries switch up; bigotries are dissolved or abandoned, or at the very least brought to light so they might be dealt with) In this new understanding of things there is freedom to do what we will, we are at liberty to advance new models for the way things go. We can do something about it.

So we planted some seeds and lots of people came to help. More, perhaps, than we knew what to do with, but it registered deeply that most people care and want to do good things and want to assert themselves constructively at a community level. I put stock in this native instinct: that to touch the ground we live on is to feel connected in a way that is unignorable. In that moment there is a process of determination which will shape future action. There are many ways and degrees to which we commit to ideas. I am most excited/invigorated by those that I've initiated out of an informed understanding that it is the thing worth doing {if it's worth the going it's worth the ride} This now is the time to do it, this is our time and we have no other.