WORK SAMPLES (2025)

OO Guide to Sobriety (REDUX), 2022

Rakish Light finished the first iteration of OO Guide to Sobriety in early 2020 with plans for an exhibition later that year. (This is when I began Other Spaces.) Two years later Rakish Light revisited the original sites, adapting the same camera to capture video of the double image projected inside the box.

The images, now moving, were surreal in the eerie way much of the immediate post-pandemic felt—(post-)apocalyptic yet distant. We paired this video with a soundtrack of singing bowls and voices recorded in an abandoned train tunnel.

 OO Guide to Sobriety, 2019

In 2018 Rakish Light built a box camera for 11×14 black-and-white lithographic negative film. The camera has two lenses of different focal lengths that capture side by side round images. Travelling to 12 locations in the American West Rakish Light repeated the same routine: drive, stop, take an exposure, drive on. Evenings were spent developing the day’s negatives in motel bathrooms turned darkrooms.

By late 2019 we had produced more than 130 negatives. We used them to make offset plates, printing image over images to produce polychromatic kaleidoscopic prints, resulting in a more than one-thousand-page artist’s book and a hand-bound edition of 50 smaller volumes.

Unique hand-bound book with wood covers and color offset lithographic interior sheets, 10 3/4 x 16 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches.

Other Spaces, 2020 on-going

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates

– Michel Foucault
“Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” 1967

Avalanche Dynamics, 2019

For the 2019 session of Forrest Island Project, an artist residency program in Mammoth Lakes, I co-curated a collaboration with the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL) administered by UCSB titled Avalanche Dynamics—derived from snow science that offers a metaphor for creative breakthroughs. My research and contributions to the project run along three tracks: (i) digital composite images of snow taken through filters; (ii) attempts to produce an ice lens to act as a temporary sculpture, observational instrument and camera; and (iii)sculptures based on Rudolf Luneburg’s description of a spherical gradient index lens.

(i) Composite Photographs

Sun Cups Hummingbird Lake July 9, 4:01 pm, 2019
cropped digital photo composite (red/green/blue filtration),  (1 & 2), 18 x 18 in.

These images are a response to the research of Jeff Dozier (Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Founding Dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UCSB). Dozier and his successors monitor the “color” of what to the human eye appears to be white snow. In an almost comically amateur mode, I took digital photographs of snow through colored filters, and then digitally reconstructed full-spectrum (white) photos by isolating red, green, and blue screens.

(ii) Ice Lens Experiments:

(iii) Lens Sculptures

The Practical Mathematician Went Fishing (Abstact Snowman) fot R. K. Luneburg in Two Parts, plaster, brass, hardware, pine pedestals, shims and stones, 26 x 11 x 6 and 11 x 11 x 17 in.

During my time at SNARL I also made sculptures of stacked crystalline structures (not snow crystals) following a volumetric gradient used in making Luneburg lenses. The pattern was determined using digital computational and 3D modeling.

These Brancussi-like forms evoke the memory of their namessake, Rudolf Lüneburg, who having just accepted an appointment at USC died in a remote tourist town while on a honeymoon fishing trip in Montana.

Collectors and Observers, 2016 – 2019

Sculptural objects and proposals base on parabolic and other antenna for radio astronomical observation.

You cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates.

— Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar

Research Materials for WiSPR (Wide Spectrum Portrait Receivers), 2016–ongoing

PALOMAR, 2016

Laure Genillard Gallery, London,

The title of my solo exhibition PALOMAR is taken from
Italo Calvino’s novel Mr. Palomar (1983), made up of 27 short chapters that correspond to a distribution of 3 interests: visual; anthropological; and more speculative experience “concerning the cosmos, time, and the relationship between the self and the world.” 

The World Looks at the World, cast glass, 51 x 51 in

The Eye and the Planets, gum-bichromate prints mounted on PVC, 19.5 x 19.5 each

PALOMAR (film), 2015

16mm color film from color negative printed from black and white original, 12 mins. Looper built by the artist (aluminum, brass, Plexiglas), trt: 12min

I filmed the eclipse on October 23, 2014, using an adapted amateur telescope set up on Mount Wilson, near to LA.

After filming, I worked with a Hollywood color timer to make a color negative from the black-and-white original. We colored each shot according to a formal structure of red, green, and blue outlined in Italo Calvino’s novel Mr. Palomar. There are 33 shots in the film, one for each chapter plus seven shots for the index.

Made in L.A., 2014

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 
(Installation Views)

Gum bichromate prints paired with architectural elements made of balsawood and glass suspended waist-high in the middle of the museum’s gallery. A displaced record of shadows cast by similar structures built outside my studio, 18 miles away.

Made in LA, process documentation, 2014

How To UCLA, 2014

“How to UCLA” (howtoucla.info) a web-based randomized listing of all the titles in UCLA’s library that include the phrase “How To.” The site was accessible through a QR code (still uncommon at the time) on the gallery wall.

CLICK ON THE TEXTS BELOW TO REFRESH

Lights & Walls, 6757 Santa Monica Blvd, July 13th – August 17th, 2013, 2013. 

Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles

My solo exhibition Lights & Walls… Included cement “paintings” and gum-bichromate prints made by capturing the light emitted from spiral bulbs. The exhibition’s title is the material naming of its conditions, circumstances, and duration as an environmental architectural intervention.

Openings to the water …

Openings to the water I stopped searched for cracks
In Istanbul, in 2012, a group of art students from Sabanci University and I cast in concrete a 27-foot, 9-ton hull, using an abandoned wooden boat found by the Bosporus as a mold. The life history of an anonymous object identifiable only as having been a working vessel, became embedded in a new form. The full title of the project is a pastiche:

Openings to the water I stopped searched for cracks
and the wanting parts I fixed
A boat sold by the daughter of its builder, a fisherman,
to a shipwright who left it there

The first two lines are from, The Why and Wherefore of the Christening of Ships (Robert G. Skerrett, in The Rudder,1919), citing Pere Scheil’s translation of the flood story in Gilgamesh (Tablet XI). The third and fourth lines are all that is known about the thing that began the project.

Concrete, steel, wooden fishing boat remnants Approximately 8 x 7 x 27 feet Protocinema, Istanbul, Turkey September 14–October 20, 2012 

We worked in a garage/studio from June to August 2012:

NuMu Projection, 2011

Projection-mapped video animation
The New Museum, New York

This animation projected a series of color photograms onto the facade of the New Museum. To produce the photograms I constructed a small-scale lead-and-glass model of the museum itself, then used a color photo enlarger to project images of the model directly onto photo paper. By manipulating filters and through multiple exposures I produced a series of color shifts which were then animated as digital video projected onto the museum’s facade.

Harry and Pete, 2011

a collaboration with Todd Bourret
DUMBO Arts Center, New York,

For the exhibition project Harry and Pete, painter Todd Bourret and I came together under three familiar constraints—space, time, and budget—to produce a body of collaborative works exploring the nature of dialog, debate, support, and influence. The show’s title refers to the relationship between sculptor Harry Holtzman (1912–1987) and painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944).

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above: Harry and Pete, 2011
Installation view: concrete sculpture and cyanotype on canvas.

left: Harry Valencia, 2011 Concrete, wood, spray paint 91½ x 39½ x 50 inches Installation view of Harry and Pete, Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY, 2011 

The Illusion of Plans, 2010

Dorsch Gallery, Miami 

The Illusion of Plans examined natural, economic, and political histories in southern Florida through the indigo plant. Once cultivated as a dye, indigo now grows like a weed in Florida. The exhibition was the result of expeditions to locate indigo plants; encounters with local botanists and horticultural bureaucracies; and the unearthing of indigo’s horrific history of exploited labor and enslavement. Workbench-height earthen partition walls followed lines on the floor of the gallery, a former lamp factory.

Foreground: (Not) Architecture: Partial Walls for Dorsch Gallery Rammed earth walls 3 x 37 x 12 feet total 

Background: The Illusion of Plans 1, 2, & 3 Stretched indigo-dyed cheesecloth 21 x 21 inches each 

Indigofera Tincoria Indigo plant on 36 x 12 x 12 inch pedestal 

Details: Meeting, PS1 July 2010, 2010
Cyanotype on ClearPrint vellum 72 x 54 inches

Series of cyanotype photograms exposed directly onto the surface of the benches in James Turrell’s installation Meeting (1986) at MoMA_PS1, Queens, NY.

Sculpture Seminar: Concrete Boatbuilding:
Its Technique and Its Future, 2009

The University of Trash, Sculpture Center, Queens, New York

For this public seminar, held over the course of three consecutive Sundays, participants made their own small-scale concrete tugboats and barges. We then launched our concrete flotilla in Newtown Creek, adjacent to the Sculpture Center. 

The Concrete Boat Project, 2009

Ferrocement (beach sand, white Portland cement, and steel)
approx.: 13 x 5 x 5 feet 

Over two weeks in April 2009, I constructed a 13-foot concrete boat on a beach near Los Angeles. I followed the process of sand-based building described in the 1971 edition of The Whole Earth Catalog, and based  the boat form on the Guppy 13,produced in the early 1970s by Melen Marine in Chatsworth, California. Bas Jan Ader used a Guppy 13 in 1975 for his final work, In Search of the Miraculous. 

We launched my boat on April 19 at the Marina Del Rey Municipal Boat Launch. It returned safely to port after a day cruising the marina.

House Beautiful, 2007

Adamski Gallery, Berlin

Installation view—
Foreground: House Beautiful, 2007 Brass and glass 45 x 38 x 30 inches
Background: photograms made using House Beautiful 

Composition No. 1; Composition with Red and Black, 2007 Color photogram (filter yellow) 40 x 30 inches

Case 111.1-8, 2007

Glass, copper, lead, wood
Total dimensions: 90 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 38 inches

Installed as part of A for Alibi
De Appel, Amsterdam, 2007 

This shelf’s 84 interpenetrating copper-and-glass boxes are based on the dimensions of every object on Shelf 111 in the Utrecht University Museum’s collection of scientific instruments. The dimensions of the objects are the only information made available by the museum, which has never published a complete catalogue or images of its holdings.