These pieces were made from shards of mirrored acrylic repurposed from past projects. All these photos were taken by the very talented WM Artist Services, www.wmartistservices.com
I was beyond honored to be asked to create a solo museum exhibit for the amazing Littleton Museum in Littleton CO. It was a bit daunting to fill the space available, but I am incredibly proud of how it turned out. The sow was titled “REinterpreting REcreating Nature” and it housed a range of pieces, from the first ever topographic experiments to my most recent installation pieces, and a wide range between. Thank you to the Littleton Museum for this amazing opportunity, you can see a video of me giving an artist talk at the museum HERE. These great images were taken by WM Artist Services, www.wmartistservices.com
These two pieces were created using topographic data of the Roaring Fork River watershed, which flows from the Elk Mountains, through Aspen and Carbondale, and into the Colorado river in Glenwood Springs. This map includes some of the most visited features in the US Forest system, including the Maroon Bells, Snowmass and Capitol peaks, and Conundrum hot springs.The first piece depicts the topography from slices of 1/8th inch wood, and the second piece is the inverse of the landscape, using the pieces that are cut from the original piece to create another interpretation of the land!
This mad board relief sculpture depicts the unedited topography of a section of the sand hills in Nebraska. The shapes and patterns are incredibly hard to find anywhere else in the world at this scale!
This beautiful piece was commissioned for the Le Meridian hotel in Salt Lake City UT through 9 Dot Arts. This was my second piece to use backlighting, and boy do people love that element! The topography of the Wasatch Mountains above 7000 feet just west of SLC are depicted in the 3D sculpture, and the topography lines below 7000 feet the glowing white lines. This piece is made from laser etched mirrored acrylic, painted wood, bent frosted acrylic, and LED lights. It measures 64 inches in diameter, and is 5 inches deep.
I also made a second colored version of the 3D sculpture.
Through funding provided by the City of Durango’s Lodgers Tax Arts and Culture Fund, I installed these two topographic tables in the Welcome Center on Main Ave in my home town of Durango Colorado. It is such an honor to finally have artwork in my hometown, blocks away from where I grew up!
Durango Table: The first table shows the immediate area surrounding the town of Durango.
Purgatory Table: This table shows the area north, south, and east of Purgatory Ski Area, including Cascade Creek, Engineer Mountain, the West Needle Mountains, and the Hermosa Cliffs.
Go check them out if you are ever in Durango!
This painted wood installation depicts the watershed of the upper Colorado River, from its source down to the confluence with the green river in Canyonlands NP. The individual watersheds of the rivers that make this system are further broken out, creating the cracks in the feature that resemble dried mud.
These out door hand sculptures spell out the letters NOBO using American Sign Language finger spelling. I installed these for the North Boulder (NoBo) Arts District the support of the Armory Boulder. Go check them out in North Boulder CO!
I was honored to be selected for an amazing opportunity in Telluride in the summer of 2022. Ah Haa School for the Arts is an amazing arts non-profit in the town of Telluride (in my opinion the prettiest town in the lower 48 states, prove me wrong!) that teaches the community all different types of artistic expression, and teaches all age ranges! Their annual fundraiser in 2022 transformed from a silent auction into an installation immersive experience, and I was selected to create one of the rooms. My installation was two 18 foot long sculptures, one depicting the topography of the near by Willson Massif, and the other the rugged mountains surrounding near by Mount Sneffels. This was so amazing to see come to life, and a butt load of work, there are over 270 separate slats of wood in this room, and each one had to be modeled, cut and painted, with 2 coats!
These first pictures are of the sculptures in the room, before the lighting crew came in to finish the installation.
And these pics are of the beautifully lit final installation!
In 2023 these sculptures were re-installed at a solo museum show at the Littleton Museum, the show was titled “Re-interpreting Re-ceating Nature”. These amazing photos were taken by Photos by: WM Artist Services, www.wmartistservices.com
So this is going to be a journey through experimentation, woohoo!
Initially i wanted to take the topographic slices technique to biological forms, so I found some free 3D models online to slice. These turned out great when cut out of mat board. I also created a little animation with the hands from this.
A few years later I had some extra money to run some experiment with, so I paid for some scans of my face and hands, to create 3D sculptures with.
Slicing these with a #D printing program called Slic3r, i created these 2D images
Those 2D images created these small test sculptures
Then I started editing, warping, and combining the 2D versions
Which led to these sculptures which are some of my absolute favorites
I also created some large scale hands
Which I loved so much I did little photo shoot with the first large hand I made
I made a few more hands, including a Grateful Dead hand
Finally for these little experiments, I started merging landscapes into the biological forms, starting with my a bust of my head with Longs Peak
And finally, this creepy combo of my face and The Loop in Canyonlands
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk
This was an installation of my recreation of the Colorado 14,000 ft peaks in mirrored acrylic. It lives in the lobby of The Fitzgerald in Denver Colorado. I love how this mirrored acrylic catches the light. Thanks to Walker Fine Art and Nine Dot Arts for making this commission possible!
This is the first ever piece I made depicting a watershed, and it turned out great! This is the Animas river, that flows from the San Juan mountains in south-west Colorado, down to the confluence with the San Juan river in New Mexico, and it is also the river I grew up on. This piece measures roughly 32 in wide, 48 in tall, and 4 in thick. I didn’t quite think about weight as I was designing this piece, and boy did it end up heavy!
As a custom piece for Christmas this year, I created this sculpture of Winter Park in Colorado, with my own boarder and outline on the lower part of the sculpture. This piece is made from painted layers of 1/4 inch birch, and I love how it turned out!
On May 17, 1973, The US Government Detonated three 33-kiloton nuclear devices thousands of feet underground in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, as a test of the feasibility of nuclear fracking. This test, named “Project Rio Blanco” was part of the broader “Plowshares Program”, an attempt to find non wartime uses for nuclear weapons. The center of the three imposed shockwaves in this piece is the drill site for “Project Rio Blanco”. This piece was created for the Land Lines show at Walker Fine Art.
Starting with a 7.5 minute map of a feature in north Routt County, Colorado, called the Nipple, I stretched and altered this map in 2D, before constructing it in 3D. This piece talks to the silly nature of humans overlaying and forcing euclidian geometry onto the fractal geometry of nature, through rectangular land allotments and the like. This piece was created for the Land Lines show at Walker Fine Art in Denver.
As a commission for the Fremont Residences, done through Walker Fine Art and Nine Dot Arts, I created this 3D map of the western US, with the 5 exploration routes of John Fremont highlighted. In the mid 1800s, John Fremont embarked on 5 large explorations of the west, starting in what is now Kansas City. Those routes were diligently researched, and traced across the American West. The map is made from painted wood, with each layer representing 1000 ft of elevation gain. The routes, border, and coast lines are back lit with LED lit acrylic, and the whole piece is framed with natural walnut. This piece measures 9.5 feet wide x 7.5 ft tall x 5 inches deep.
As part of the show ‘Land Lines’ at Walker Fine Art (On display from Sept 25th - Nov 7th, 2020), I created this installation consisting of all of Colorado’s 14,000 ft peaks, recreated with gold, silver, and bronze mirrored acrylic. The mountains were isolated by their lowest encompassing elevation contour that still focused on the locality of the mountain. All the mountains are to scale with each other, sliced at the same elevation interval, oriented north south, and arranged in their general organization across the state (I had to crowd them in together to fit on the wall, especially the Sawatch range).
This wall hanging sculpture was created as a commissioned art piece for Revelstoke Capital’s new Cherry Creek office, through Walker Fine Art.
I depicts a very large area of the mountains to the east and south of Revelstoke Canada, rendered in the Colorado flag inspired color palette. This is easily the largest sculpture I have made, and I am very pleased with how it turned out. The materials are cut birch plywood, with each piece being hand painted. the contour steps are every 500 feet. What do you think?
This is the first piece I have made for Walker Fine Art in Denver! this mat board piece, titled “¡”, shows the topography of Denver rendered in the colors of the Colorado flag, with an exclamation point superimposed onto the topography. It measures 32 in wide, 40 in tall, and 3 in deep.
Gold, silver, and bronze mirrored acrylic stack to form contour bounded mountains.
This piece was commissioned by a friend from North Carolina, and it depicts Mt Mitchell, the highest point in the US east of the Mississippi.
