2018
April 27th - May 11th
January - April 2018
The process of creating the room took place over the course of four months. The room that I used was quickly constructed by a installation class, but it was my job to fix it up, install the light fixtures that I had made, and paint it. At the same time, I gathered the wood and aluminum (which I would later melt down and cast) from Craigslist and trash heaps. The wool I would use to wrap the chairs was the offshoot of a mattress manufacturer, and fishing wire that acted as binding was left over from old projects.
2017
July - August 2017 ____________________
For two months in the summer of 2017, I worked for the public sculptors Raymond Kaskey and Charles Bergen in Northeast DC. Raymond was a seasoned sculptor with a classical figurative style, and his most notable work was in the World War II Memorial. Charles Bergen was a architect who had more recently made the transition into public art, and was work on converting callboxes and building playful sculptures for a variety of institutions.
I worked largely with Charles, helping design the facades of many of the callboxes, communicating with fabricators, organizing projects and helping with the move into his new studio space.
June 2017 ______________________
In the summer of 2017 I was lucky enough to receive a grant from Pomona College to attend a two week intensive workshop at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Haystack is a small craft school on Deer Isle, off the coast of Maine, that offers two week courses in different medium including ceramics, wood, and blacksmithing.
I attended a course taught by the woodworker and furniture maker Zeke Leonard where we took apart old pianos and transformed them into our own experimental instruments. My instrument was based of an instrument sketched in Da Vinci's notebooks called the Viola Organista. It combined the appearance and keys of a piano with the sounding mechanism of a cello. The instrument was still in progress at the end of two weeks, and it is a project I hope to finish soon.
September 6, 2017 ______________________
In 2017, while living on Havana, Cuba, I met the incredible percussionist Degnis Bofill. Degnis had already a name for himself traveling internationally with various salsa bands, and then more recently as the percussionist for the legendary Síntesis and various jazz groups.
Soon after meeting, Degnis mentioned to me his desire to shoot a music video for the first song of his solo project, called Degnis Bofil y Golpes Libres. The title of the song, El Espendrun, refers to the Cuban slang for afro. In the song, Degnis mixes countless different musical and lyrical references into a bouncy, playful
January - May, 2017 ______________________
The filming of El Espendrun took place over the course of about four moths, including planning, scouting, and filming. In the end we shot at 6 locations, used 3 cameras, and got together close to 60 people. It was a major learning experience for me, Mario (the cameraman), and Degnis, who had never directed a project like this before.
January - May, 2017 ______________________
