STATEMENT

I build monuments to people whose lives are rarely considered worthy of monuments.

My sculptures examine the politics of class, labor, and taste—by poking at the myths of American meritocracy. Raised within the working-class realities I interrogate, I approach material not simply as metaphor but as lived infrastructure. Concrete, bronze, cinder blocks, work gloves, lottery tickets, cheap domestic objects: each carries evidence of how systems shape people.

My earlier work began inside the home. Class was always there, although I wasn't yet naming it directly. The aesthetics, objects, humor, shame, desire, and attempts at respectability all came from the same place.

The work has since moved from the domestic interior into the architecture of public memory. Traditional monuments perform permanence, authority, and triumph. Mine refuse that fiction.

Within these structures, bronzed beer cans, gloves, lottery tickets, air fresheners, cigarettes, and other artifacts of working-class life replace generals and heroes. I use the permanence and authority of sculpture to commemorate things our culture considers disposable.

I am not interested in romanticizing poverty or reducing working people to victims. I am interested in tenderness without sentimentality: the humor, ugliness, aspiration, ingenuity, desperation, and contradiction of working-class life.

Because, ultimately, I still like shiny things, sleazy things, and nacho cheese.