A suite of works titled Country Living featured in group show It’s What’s Inside That Counts currently on view at CR10

July-August 2025

Artist’s statement: 

My aim was to refute the adage, "Don’t count your chickens before they hatch." But my argument extends further: do not count them even once they have hatched. The saying, a playful caution against presumption, implies the egg guarantees a bird. Yet, even a bird does not guarantee its survival. The farm, like nature itself, is often seen as the fount of truth in art and metaphor. Lacking a definitive answer, I sought to use this work to question our blind faith in the supposed purity of nature and the virtue of rural life.

I gathered objects and ephemera from my own daily existence: a deaccessioned diorama from the American Museum of Natural History, a CCTV surveillance camera and a prison monitor, a surveyor’s tripod, a silver-plated platter scarred with bullet holes, billiard balls, a chicken feeder, and green felt, airline cable, a C-clamp, and so on. The construction methods I employed simultaneously concealed anomalous juxtapositions through seamless joinery, whether physical or through video editing, while also making no attempt to hide any 'ugliness'—cords, staples—for the sake of arbitrary neatness.

Billiard balls evoke the dual meaning of "game." I use them interchangeably as themselves and as eggs. "Game" also denotes any animal whose demise is inherent in its designation. In "Coop Loop," my own chickens—'game birds'—are part of a simple camera trick, akin to the clown car cliché, suggesting the impossible: an endless procession of chickens entering the coop, never to emerge. The piece serves as concise proof of a scenario where one cannot count their chickens.

In "Trees are Highways," I appropriated a former educational tool from the American Museum of Natural History: a mobile diorama designed to display urban-dwelling wildlife and their use of trees. I altered its contents, suspending it askew from the ceiling, weighted by a cue ball, compelling it to rotate. The stillness of these taxidermied animals is reanimated, and the serious purpose of the object's origin is negated, rendered less intelligible and seemingly without point.

"Break Shot" presents a racked set of billiard balls, poised to be broken. Yet, in its reflection on the bullet-ridden platter, it is already broken. This state is echoed again in the two photograms positioned behind the piece. The balls’ fate is laid bare before them, not unlike that of a game bird.