You have worked and exhibited internationally and this is your first time having your work shown at a Wassaic Project exhibition. How did you hear about the Wassaic Project and come to submit your work for this exhibition?

Before moving to Santa Fe recently, I had been living and working in New York, where I was actively involved in both the nonprofit art world and my own artistic practice. From 2022 to 2024, I worked at the Guggenheim Museum while simultaneously developing art projects—an experience that gave me a deep appreciation for the challenges and possibilities of sustaining creative work within institutional structures. That’s part of why I’ve always been drawn to artist-run initiatives like the Wassaic Project. Its collaborative nature, independence, and long-standing commitment to community-oriented programming have always struck me as both admirable and utopian.

The Wassaic Project’s deep ties to the hamlet of Wassaic also make it a uniquely compelling site for artistic engagement. I’ve visited a few times and have always loved the Maxon Mills exhibition space—a historic grain elevator that stands apart from conventional white-cube galleries. Because my practice often responds to the spatial and social contexts in which it is presented, I was excited for the opportunity to finally share my work in such a dynamic, storied environment.

As a prolific interdisciplinary artist working in a wide variety of modes and media, a process that seems to run through your practice is the use of research as a starting point.  Can you speak about the research that led to this current series, My Fellow Presidents?

Much of my work centers around themes of migration and displacement, often approached through the lens of both human communities and non-human subjects. In earlier projects, I focused on diaspora narratives in U.S. Chinatowns and the cross-border journeys of confiscated plants. More recently, I became interested in the politics of place, particularly how historical narratives are encoded in public monuments and memorials.

That’s when I encountered the discarded presidential head statues in Virginia—massive sculptures that were once part of a roadside attraction. After the original sculpture park went bankrupt, the heads were displaced and moved to a construction site by a local man who decided to preserve them. During the relocation, large holes were smashed into the tops of their heads to allow for crane transport. These broken, weather-worn sculptures—clustered together in a remote field—now sit in a surreal and almost post-apocalyptic landscape.

A field trip to the site in Williamsburg became foundational to my project. I gathered aerial drone footage, thermal imaging, 3D scans, and field recordings of the natural environment—wind, insects, birds—as well as snippets of whispered conversations from visitors on U.S. Memorial Day 2024. These materials formed the basis of a video piece Whispers and this stamp series My Fellow Presidents.

Photography is one of the most salient techniques in your work. The images in My Fellow Presidents were created using thermal imaging. This technique responds to heat differentials in the object being photographed and creates an image with varying colors corresponding to those differentials. It produces an alternate way of looking at the object.  Can you talk about the equipment that you use for this process and what led you to experiment with this technique specifically for the subject matter of My Fellow Presidents?

My background includes formal training in photography, and while my practice has long been image-based, I often explore alternative photographic processes and how they intersect with other media. In past works like Blueprints, I used diazotype paper to develop images from found urban fragments, while in The Wardian, I used photogrammetry to simulate the X-ray inspection process used at international borders when the orchid was first discovered.

For My Fellow Presidents, I employed a portable infrared camera lens to capture thermal differentials across the statues’ surfaces. Thermal imaging reveals fluctuations in heat that are invisible to the human eye—offering a way of “seeing” that feels ghostly, uncanny, and temporally specific. These statues are not static; they are subject to weather, overgrown with vines, inhabited by insects, and surrounded by murmuring visitors. The thermal lens captures fleeting conditions—each image a unique imprint of a particular moment. It allowed me to engage the statues not as inert monuments but as dynamic bodies embedded in time, nature, and political memory.