In my early teens I visited the "Holyland Model", a 1:50 scale model of biblical Jerusalem on display at a hotel in modern Jerusalem. Partly inspired by this memory, three years ago I began "kitchen" experiments with sugar cubes and ancient building techniques such as arches and domes. Eventually incorporating icing as mortar, I pushed the structural properties of the materials to their limits in an effort to distance the results from being mere architectural miniatures and allow the structures to develop unique forms. At times I feel like the builder of a crystal city, a scientist making large-scale molecular models or a gardener cultivating a cancer that grows over and through the rooms of the gallery.

The cubes suggest the elemental building blocks of a child’s toy as well as the stone foundations of ancient cities. The installations develop much as cities do, following a history of construction, destruction, and reconstruction. As the forms develop, their growth mimics that of natural organisms as well as cities. As nature is politically ambivalent, the installation may appear either as parasitic growth or benign life suggesting hope and rebirth.

The sugar cubes are elemental building blocks in another way, as food-stuff. Kool-Aid was introduced later for its contrasting color, sweet smell and because I felt a need for a water element of some kind. Practically devoid of nutritional substance, Kool-Aid, icing and sugar cubes are all ‘empty’ food materials in the same way that cake is empty in relation to bread. My aim is to develop a tension between the subject matter and the materials. The domestic setting of Haus also aids in connecting disturbing world events to the home as destruction and death are suggested in crumbing blocks of sugar and pools of blood red candy.

The choice in materials follows also my increasing discomfort in making art that is entirely removed from the world of people and events I live in. I don't want to be entirely formal, nor do I want to be flatly political. This formal/political conflict is partly why I like to work with these highly associative domestic materials in a largely formalist way.

Whatever readings they might suggest, the installation is in the end a trace of the human labor that went into its making. What emerges from the installation is the figure of its creator/modeler/hobbyist for whom a world of war and disease is worked through and brought home.