Flight 01, 2024
Cloth dissected map: Westchester County census block groups dispersed, pigment ink on paper on linen
3.5 x 3.5 inches, unfolds to 19 x 13.5 inches

Flight 02, 2024
Cloth dissected map: Westchester County census block groups dispersed, pigment ink on paper on linen
9.5 x 9 inches, unfolds to 36 x 57 inches


Flight maps derive their form from early 18th & 19th century dissected maps, when paper maps were divided into smaller sections, then mounted on wood or cloth backing. On wood, dissected map pieces were used to teach geography and were said to be the early predecessors of the modern jigsaw puzzle. On cloth, dissected maps easily folded into multi-functional portable devices less susceptible to cracks and tearing than paper alone.

Pulled from such curious histories, these cloth dissected maps of Westchester County query and scramble any political, educational, or practical functions of map making. Taking the county’s 2020 census block groups and dispersing them across the papered surface, Flight maps hold multiple and contradictory meanings. They carry the inestimable burdens of past and contemporary patterns of racial disparity and white flight in the region. They consider non-human patterns of migration in the context of climate change and habitat destruction. And they project possible future worlds where both human and hon-human populations might be released and reimagined beyond existing categorical constraints.


Source: 2020 Census Blocks Groups Dataset, Westchester County GIS (view source map)


Installation note: Display vertically (unfold and simply hang on wall from 2 points) or horizontally (choose from various folded configurations). When displayed horizontally, small maps can be handled, easily folded and unfolded.

2023
Stiffened thread and string
45 x 54 inches

Elsewheres are a series of threaded maps that spread like cracks in the walls of Hastings-on-Hudson’s Village Hall as part of a 2023 solo site-specific installation, BUILT ON THE SITE of…, commissioned by the village. Emerging from archival research into the history of the 1929 municipal building and the surrounding site, each piece in the Elsewheres series tangles with an aspect of the region’s industrial history, zooming out to follow the pathways of bodies and materials to other times and places.

Elsewhere (NY-RR) explores the site’s early history in the stone industry, following the 19th century rail lines and waterways used for carrying large slabs of bluestone from upstate New York to be milled in Hastings for the production of miles and miles of early city sidewalk.

Source: Map of the Rail Roads of the State of New York (Van R. Richmond and S.H. Sweet, 1870)


> Elsewhere (Transatlantic)
> Elsewhere (Pitch)

2023
Pigment ink on cloth-covered coaxial cable
~100 linear feet

Transmission Line is cloth-covered coaxial cable crafted to channel past lives of places it moves through. Historical fragments are externalized on the surface, in the slow physical form of pigment ink on fabric, rather than invisibly carried at high speeds within.

Transmission Line is wrapped with scraps and made from the discards, leftovers, and remains of contemporary communication infrastructure coiling along floors, ceilings, and wall surfaces everywhere around us.

Pictured here: ~100 linear feet of Transmission 36-32710 for a site-specific installation at Hastings-on-Hudson's Village Hall. Carrying bits and pieces of archival research into the history of the site, the cable unfurled and time-traveled throughout the old municipal building upstairs and down.

2024
Thread on canvas, cloth-covered chipboard
Open: 9.25 x 20 x 1.75 inches
Closed: 9.25 x 9.25 x 1.75 inches

Minute Lines are lines as long as the time it takes to make them. We often think in terms of navigating space. This ongoing project ponders how we navigate time. It is about time as a measure of distance, as in how many minutes away. It is about filling time and killing time, occupied and unoccupied time. It is about telling time, as in how many minute lines, and about time as something we learn to tell. It is about waiting time and waiting lines, about streamlining time and lost time. 

Minute Lines meditate on the temporal dimensions of things. And these measures depend on the hands that create them, the materials that move them, the bodies that feel them, and the environments that support them.

15 Minute Lines with Lost Time is the second iteration of this project.

Score for Minute Lines (book form)>
Find a surface to become pages.
Determine a standard size.
Prepare blank pages.
On the first day, set a timer for 1 minute.
Locate a starting point on page 1.
Start the timer.
Draw a continuous line .
Do not plan the line’s trajectory in advance.
Stop when the time is up.
On the second day, set a timer for 2 minutes.
Locate a starting point on page 2.
Start the timer.
Draw a continuous line .
Stop when the time is up.
On the third day, set a timer for 3 minutes.
And so on.
Try to reach the 10 minute line.
Go further if you can.
Stop when it is time.
Compile your pages.
Set aside all mistakes, holes, splotches, malfunctions as lost time.

> 60 Minute Lines

2023
Gesso on cut waste paper
Distorted dimensions of 11 x 8.5 inches

Loaded Forms is an ongoing series whereby I systematically drop out the contents of bureaucratic forms and fill them out otherwise. Two sets of forms have been completed so far. Loaded Forms 01 focuses on the U.S. Department of State. Loaded Forms 02 (10706) zooms in to a local government municipality.

Commissioned to do a solo site-specific installation in the municipal building of the village where I now live, I filled out one government form daily, by emptying it of its contents, extracting all form fields, and warping the cut paper planes into alternative arrangements.

Forms Filled (one per day)
Application for Certificate of Business Operation
Permit Application for Filming
Short Environmental Assessment Form (pt 1)
NYS DMV Handicap Application
View Preservation Approval Application Checklist
Application for Use of Parks & Fields
Are You Ok Senior Citizen Check-in
Absentee Ballot Application
Flood History Disclosure Form
Short Environmental Assessment Form (pts 2, 3)
Architectural Review Board Application
Truss Utilization Form
Solar Checklist
Application for Accessory Apartment
Committee/Board Application Form
Rehire Employment Packet
Statement of Final Cost
Solar Permit Affidavit
Steep Slopes Application Checklist
Community Center Rental Form
Site Plan Approval Application Checklist
Planning Board Application
Zoning Board of Appeals Application
Street Vendor Application
Statement Regarding Parking Permit
Claiming a Broken Meter

Source: Hastingsgov.org > Documents & Forms

> Loaded Forms 01

2023
Stiffened thread and string
48 x 52 inches

Elsewheres are a series of threaded maps that spread like cracks in the walls of Hastings-on-Hudson’s Village Hall as part of a 2023 solo site-specific installation, BUILT ON THE SITE of…, commissioned by the village. Emerging from archival research into the history of the 1929 municipal building and the surrounding site, each piece in the Elsewheres series tangles with an aspect of the region’s industrial history, zooming out to follow the pathways of bodies and materials to other times and places.

Elsewhere(Transatlantic) travels into the site’s past life in sugar refining as a critical node in the mid 19th century transatlantic trade of enslaved labor and extracted raw materials between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Source: Steamship Connections of World Traffic in the Atlantic Ocean (Leipzig : F.A. Brockhaus, c. 1880-1885)

> Elsewhere (NY-RR)
> Elsewhere (Pitch)

Misusing the fathom as unit of depth (1 fathom = 6 feet) to measure the perimeters of household exteriors and interiors, each coiled line holds tightly and hides the everyday lives it measures.

House Perimeter 117, 2024
34 fathoms of coiled rope with linen thread
29 x 29 inches

Bathroom 117, 2024 (pictured with House 117)
2½ fathoms of coiled rope with linen thread
8 x 8 inches

Kitchen 117, 2024
10½ fathoms of coiled rope with linen thread
16 x 16 inches

House 14, 2020
35½ fathoms of coiled rope with linen thread
27 x 27 inches

Fathoms, installation view

Pictured L to R:
Kitchen 117, House 117, Bathroom 117, Living Room 117, House 14

2024
Thread on cotton
12 × 12 inches

Life Lines F1 is a piece from a larger series of quilted works that explore how stitched lines create space and movement through layered surfaces. In this case, the layered surface references my own skin, and the lines record its accumulating wrinkles.

> It’s Complicated / Summer Exhibition Catalog / I Like Your Work

Loaded Forms is an ongoing series begun mid-pandemic in a bare waiting room of a U.S. embassy on the other side of earth, where with no material allowed on my person, I mentally traced the outlines of a passport renewal form. From there, I fell down a U.S. State Department rabbit hole. Lost in forms that quietly dictate global mobility and identification, I systematically download, trace, print, and extract the fields of each one. The paper negatives accumulate into a ghostly cityscape. They are the bureaucratic ruins of nation-building and border control.

My preoccupation with paper forms can be traced back to when my gravely ill mother-in-law, a Mexican immigrant who had recently obtained U.S. citizenship, was dropped and bankrupted by her health insurance upon filling out a form incorrectly. In this context, my skewed and obsessive material reenactments of bureaucratic labor in the studio are desperate and futile attempts to process the excruciating life and death banality of administration.

Loaded Forms (US/World Map), 2021
Empty U.S. State Department form fields, ink, and Wite-Out on household waste paper, gessoed recycled chipboard
Each: 11 x 8.5 inches
Overall: 55 x 110.5 inches

Loaded Forms (Ruins), 2021-2024
Negative cut-outs, emptied and cut U.S. State Department forms with gesso and acrylic on household waste paper
Floor/Pedestal: Dimensions variable
Wall: 11 x 72 x 3 inches


Forms filled (one per day)
DS-10 Birth Affidavit
DS-11 Application for a U.S. Passport
DS-64 Statement Regarding a Lost or Stolen Passport
DS-82 U.S. Passport Renewal Application for Eligible Individuals
DS-86 Statement of Non-Receipt of a Passport
DS-117 Application to Determine Returning Resident Status
DS 156E Nonimmigrant Treaty Trader/Investor Application
DS-157 SupplementalSIVChiefofMissionApplication
DS-158 Special Immigrant Visa Supervisor Locator
DS-234 Special Immigrant VIsa Biodata Form
DS-1504 Request for Customs Clearance of Merchandise
DS-1884 Petition to Classify Special Immigrant Under INA 203 (b) (4) as an Employee or Former Employee of the U.S. Government Abroad
DS-1981 Affidavit Concerning Exemption from Immigrant Vaccination Requirements for a Foreign Adopted Child
DS-2004 Notification of Appointment of Foreign Government Employee
DS-2006 Notification of Change / Identification Card Request
DS-2029 Application for Consular Report of Birth Abroad of a Citizen of the United States of America
DS-2038 Application for Certificate of International Educational Character
DS-3053 Statement of Consent or Special Circumstances Issuance of a Passport to a Minor Under Age 16
DS-3057 Medical Clearance Update
DS-3072 Repatriation/Emergency Medical and Dietary Assistance Loan Application
DS-3077 Request for Entry into Children's Passport Issuance Alert Program
DS-3079 Formal Complaint of Discrimination
DS-3090 Cryptographic Access Request
DS-4024 Smart Traveler Enrollment Program
DS-4079 Questionnaire Information for Determining Possible Loss of U.S. Citizenship
DS-4080 Oath/Affirmation of Renunciation of Nationality of United States
DS-4081 Statement of Understanding Concerning the Consequences and Ramifications of Relinquishment or Renunciation of U.S. Nationality
DS-4082 Witnesses' Attestation Renunciation/ Relinquishment of Citizenship
DS-4083 Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States
DS-4138 Request for Escort Screening Courtesies
DS-4139 Photograph and Signature Card
DS-7677 Contractor Country Clearance Request

source: eforms.state.gov

Related projects:

> Loaded Forms 02

2023
Stiffened thread and string
34 x 45 inches

Elsewheres are a series of threaded maps that spread like cracks in the walls of Hastings-on-Hudson’s Village Hall as part of a recently commissioned solo site-specific installation called BUILT ON THE SITE of… for the village’s 1929 Municipal Building (see details image 5). Emerging from extensive research into the history of the building and the surrounding site, each piece in the _Elsewhere_ series tangles with an aspect of the region’s industrial history, , zooming out to follow the pathways of bodies and materials to other times and places.

This third thread mapping of the Elsewheres series installed on the walls of Hastings Village Hall takes its form from another chapter of the site’s stone industrial history—the asphalt extracted from La Brea Pitch, Trinidad, shipped in barrels, and mixed with cement to make what was called Hastings Pavement.

Source: Satellite imagery, Google Earth

> Elsewhere (NY-RR)
> Elsewhere (Transatlantic)

2022
Acrylic and gesso on discarded mattress parts with wire armature
24 x 18 x 4 inches

Sleep Settings extracts its tangled form from the surface of my discarded mattress, lifting the framework of stitching from its many years of fill.

Each Settings piece quietly grapples with patterns of everyday life made more apparent, more tangible, and more bewildering over the course of countless days and nights.

> Table Settings

2021
Four weeks of dinner tracings (Oct–Nov 2020) with pencil and thread on discarded household linens
68 x 48 inches

Table Settings gives form to the accumulated tracings of plates, utensils and all the other objects that make up the shifting terrain of a single dinner table. It quietly grapples with patterns of everyday life made more apparent and more tangible over the course of countless days and nights. The patterns are belabored and bewildering—on one side a record of relations and movement, and on the other a tactile universe emerging from lines that are normally wiped away.

Recipient of The Fine Art Textiles Award, 2022

> Sleep Settings

2021
Thread and string on discarded white-collared shirt
34 x 28 inches

Pressed Shirt ponders various forms of labor—domestic work and dirty work, blue-collar and white-collar, maintenance and management. Laundering and pressing are routine forms of labor that keep up appearances through processes of erasure, of wiping clean, of ironing out. They are also part and parcel of larger systems of erasure, whereby such labors are continuously (and by design) invisibilised. This shirt was worn and worn out by someone close to me in their struggles to succeed inside a world of work to which they were never supposed to belong. The stitching is a kind of monument and a record of the wrinkles.

2021, ongoing
Crocheted chain lengths from found and donated yarns, some hand-dyed
Each line: 1–60 minutes long

Minute Lines are lines as long as the time it takes to make them. We often think in terms of navigating space. This ongoing project ponders how we navigate time. It is about time as a measure of distance, as in how many minutes away. It is about filling time and killing time, occupied and unoccupied time. It is about telling time, as in how many minute lines, and about time as something we learn to tell. It is about waiting time and waiting lines, about streamlining time and lost time.

Minute Lines meditate on the temporal dimensions of things. And these measures depend on the hands that create them, the materials that move them, the bodies that feel them, and the environments that support them.

60 Minute Lines is the first iteration of this project.

> 15 Minute Lines with Lost Time

2020
Cut-up and corded white-collared shirt
30 x 6 x 3 inches

2020, ongoing
Selected terms and agreements consented to by the artist, printed and bound with pigment ink on recycled paper, cloth, chipboard
Each: 2 x 1.375 x (variable) inches

These classic works of techno-bureaucratic literature put into printed form various terms of service that quietly govern online activity, regulate privacy, and condition free expression. The series is ongoing but always one step behind the endlessly accumulating fine print that everywhere binds us with our supposed consent.

22 volumes to date:
01 My Chart Terms of Use
02 Terms & Conditions of Using American Express Cards in Apple Pay
03 Substack Terms of Use
04 Microsoft Services Agreement
05 UPS Complete View® Solutions Terms and Conditions
06 UPS General Terms and Conditions
07 UPS Technology Agreement
08 Instagram Terms of Use
09 Transact Campus SmartPay Terms of Use
10 IKEA North America Services, LLC Privacy Policy
11 IKEA North America Services, LLC Terms and Conditions
12 Venmo Privacy Policy
13 Venmo User Agreement
14 The District eSchoolPortal Information System Contract
15 Google Terms of Service
16 Google Privacy Policy
17 Facebook Terms of Service
18 WhatsApp Terms of Service
19 iCloud Terms and Conditions
20 United States Postal Service® Terms of Use
21 Epson End User Software License Agreement
22 WeTransfer Terms of Service

> See also audiobooks

2020
Cast waste paper pulp, thread, ink
0.7 x 0.7 x 1.6 inches (per earbud)

2020, never-ending
Black spray paint on plastic film air pillows
Dimensions variable

01 AIRplus, 5 x 8 inches
02 AirSpeed by Pregis, 8 x 9 inches
03 Earth Aware, 4 x 8 inches
04 AirSpeed by Pregis, 5 x 8 inches
05 Sealed Air Fill-Air Extreme, 5 x 8 inches
06 Uline, 8 x 8 inches
07 AIRSPACE, 5 x 8 inches
08 IncrediSeal Advanced Air, 3.75 x 11.5 inches
09 Sealed Air Fill-Air Extreme, 7 x 9.75 inches

Void Fill is an obsessive and ongoing taxonomy of inflated air pillows that occupy empty spaces around contents in corrugated shipping boxes. It began in a dank garage on recycling day after moving from one side of the earth to the other in the midst of a global pandemic.

Find more of this project hiding inside Fulfillment Travel Services, B-PLOT’s unrealized travel agency > fulfillment.travel/void-fill

Void Fill was published in Issue One of The European Review of Books (2022).

2020
pigment ink on fabric, cast waste paper pulp

“Peel here” bottle labels are called in the industry “expanded content labels” or ECLs. I think about this idea of “expanded content” as the stories we read now, or maybe don’t, but our lives are still arranged by them, and I fantasize about swapping out the words for other more unruly ones.

01 / Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons
3.5 x 1.75 x 1.75 inches / unrolls to 38.5 inches

02 / UPC code of cast bottle of Biotin
3.5 x 1.75 x 1.75 inches / unrolls to 24.5 inches

Insecurity Blanket 14, 2020
GPS tracks on cut waste paper
18 x 13 inches

Insecurity Blanket 2019-nCoV, 2020
Wuhan railway network on cut waste paper
14 x 11.5 inches

2021
Cloth dissected map: pencil on paper on linen
3 x 3 inches, unfolds to 9 x 24 inches


More cloth dissected maps >
Flat Pack
Flight

2019
N95 mask, fabric offcuts
Standard size

2018
Thread and pigment ink on flat cotton bedsheet
36 x 24 inches

A flat sheet is a smooth surface of something. A flat sheet of cloth, of covering, of paper is pressed and always fleeting. Materials crumple, bend, fold, crush, crease with use and information and remember the lines. Social accusations fly around what is or isn't natural, but crumpled systems know about the precariousness of orders. After all, what is natural for human systems that often delineate the natures of things upon mythological blank slates, and define those things in terms of what they are not?

2020, ongoing
Cast waste paper pulp imprinted with textiles
Variable and distorted dimensions conforming to the
aspect ratio of √2

ISO 216 International Standards for A Series Paper Size
Formats, A2–A10
A10: 1.5 x 1 inches
A9: 2 x 1.5 inches
A8: 2.9 x 2 inches
A7: 4.1 x 2.9 inches
A6: 5.8 x 4.1 inches
A5: 8.3 x 5.8 inches
A4: 11.7 x 8.3 inches
A3: 16.5 x 11.7 inches
A2: 23.4 X 16.5 inches

2020
Cloth dissected map: Ikea instructions, discarded bookcover on linen
3.75 x 2.75 inches, unfolds to 11 x 22 inches

More cloth dissected maps >
Cracks 10706
Flight

2020
iCloud terms and conditions consented to 5 May 2020
Pigment ink on upcycled vinyl and cardboard
1.625 x 1.75 x 1.625 in / unrolls to 680 in.
9090 words, 55302 characters, 18.9 yards

2016
Thread on cotton
40.5 X 40.5 inches

Stitched lines travel right to left without crossing through this tactile surface which conveys the potential of the lines themselves to create space and movement.

> Left to Right

2016
Pigment ink and thread on old household linens
3.5 x 5.5 inches

1209 Post Roads is a series of screen captures of a single address in various different locations across the United States. Often, residential street names in American suburbs are designed to convey some kind of quality or distinction, depending on the aspirations of the communities that live there. But Post Roads are throughways from cities to suburbs whose simple names reference their long and fascinating histories as the main transportation routes for postal mail and other forms of communication. I happened to live on one of these Post Roads, at a particular address that was not unique. I know, because when I would map it, while lost in the suburbs upon first moving there, many other 1209 Post Roads would appear as alternate destinations. So, while dwelling in a region bursting with street names referencing nature and poets and presidents, I found myself drawn instead to the beautiful ordinariness and functionality of my own address and the connectedness of my location to others.

2018
Pigment ink and thread on discarded fabric and Apple, Inc. packaging
89 x 7 x 2.5 inches

In the so-called Information Age of screen displays and digital scrolling texts, Agreements materialize the endless terms of use that bind us to global supply chains of production and labor, to corporate profits and financial services, and to larger platforms of surveillance. For those of us who operate with digital media and communication technologies of any kind, these are the material terms by which our daily lives are increasingly lived, whether we're online or off.

Apple users know well the myriad freedoms and falls that come with our seamlessly packaged personal devices. But with every touch, click, download, update, interaction, and bite, we are formally agreeing to broader terms of use, participation, and privacy that have enormous material consequences. Agreement iOS 11.2 makes physical those terms of use left out of beautiful boxes and designed to be out of sight.

PLEASE READ THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT (“LICENSE”) CAREFULLY BEFORE USING YOUR iOS DEVICE OR DOWNLOADING THE SOFTWARE UPDATE ACCOMPANYING THIS LICENSE. BY USING YOUR iOS DEVICE OR DOWNLOADING A SOFTWARE UPDATE, AS APPLICABLE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT USE THE iOS DEVICE OR DOWNLOAD THE SOFTWARE UPDATE.—Apple iOS 11.2 Agreement

2018
Thread and string on cotton
44 x 45 inches

Continuing to explore the potential of stitched lines themselves to create space and movement, Left to Right manipulates the surface more deliberately into positions.

> Right to Left

2020
Cast waste paper pulp
8: 3 x 5 x 1.75 inches
8 plus: 3.5 x 6.5 x 2 inches

2016
Thread and string on cotton
46 x 39 inches

Undercover takes the quilt form itself as its subject matter. Quilts typically have two sides and perform multiple operations. They are variously portable, utilitarian, decorative, protective, and potentially covert. 

Recipient of the Founder’s Award, Artist as Quiltmaker XVIII, 2018

2017
Cut-up old clothes, stitched and bound
7 x 6.5 inches

2017
Pigment ink and thread on old household linens
8 x 8 inches

2015
Thread on cotton
7 x 10 inches

Textile map of Singapore’s reservoirs, rivers, waterways, and drains

Source: The Blue Map of Singapore in "Meeting the Challenges of Sustainable Water Supply - Integrated Water Resource Management" by Young Joo Chye, Deputy Director, Best Sourcing, PUB Singapore, Session 2, 22 Oct 08

2018
Pigment ink, thread, and string on cotton
45 x 31 inches

Cloud Cover .SG materializes my view of the sky over Singapore from a single location for a period of nine days. Clouds are curious and ambivalent mixtures. They can uplift, but they can also obscure. As signifiers in our now digital lives—cloud storage, cloud computing, cloud security—clouds are everyplace and noplace, their material infrastructures and backends far outside of our fields of vision. In our physical landscapes, clouds are location-bound but otherworldly. They shape shift and move at variable speeds. They carry signals and substances, messages and memories, futures and risks. Looking up, I map the cover as a form of tribute to all the things I cannot see.

2015
Thread on cotton
70 x 58 inches

Photography: Laura Miller / Model: Haley Weiner

2014
GPS track recordings
Digitally mapped and printed
8.5 x 11 inches

As a way to cope with the shock of a more automobile-dominated existence outside of the city and the utter banality of my obligatory back and forths by car and on foot, I generated GPS drawings of my daily tracks for about three months, using my phone as a GPS logger. The drawings variously manipulate the track recordings with color and scale, and some of them overlay several days' tracks in one frame.

2016
Organic Cotton Voile, Batting, Thread, String
Straight and Free-motion Stitching
52 x 43 inches

2015
Pencil, thread, and string on discarded curtain and white collared shirt
24 x 37

Remembering 1209 traces my everyday routes around an American suburb that I both loved and loathed. To cope with the shock of an automobile-dominated existence outside the city, I used my phone to generate GPS drawings of my daily tracks. The stitched patterns are at once abstract and deeply personal. They make something beautiful out of the seemingly banal, but they also reveal the thickness of place as they carry my memories of being there.

Recipient of the Founder’s Award, Artist as Quiltmaker XVII, 2016

2016
Thread and string on cotton
42.5 x 57 inches

MRT Lines is a tactile interpretation of the Land Transport Authority of Singapore’s 2015 map of the Mass Rapid Transit System, which includes all existing lines and those under construction. Groundbreaking for the massive public works project began in 1983 after a decade long rail vs. bus debate culminated in a 1981 comprehensive traffic study declaring rail to be more efficient. Singapore’s MRT system officially launched in 1988 and has been expanding ever since. By 2030, the Land Transport Authority aims to double the rail network from its current 178km to 360km.

2017
Thread on tulle and textile scraps
16 x 16.5 inches

Each textile drawing in this series is made from a covering’s offcuts - all the trimmings, threads, and other miscellanea that were discarded in the process of its making.

2015, ongoing
Embroidery on linen
10.5 x 10.5 inches

Daily practice, as instructed by my 92 year-old neighbor and dear friend Freda, following torn pages from her well-worn manual, Family Circle's Treasury of Needlework Stitches by Jacqueline Enthoven (May 1971) 

April - June 2015: Nos. 1-14

December 2015 - February 2016: Nos. 15-22

2016
Thread on tulle and textile scraps
12.5 x 12.5 inches

Each textile drawing in this series is made from a covering’s offcuts - all the trimmings, threads, and other miscellanea that were discarded in the process of its making.

2015
Thread on cotton
51 x 44 inches

Photography: Laura Miller / Model: Haley Weiner

2017
/with Rakhee Jain Desai
Thread, batik painting, and upcycled Indian brocade on cotton
Panels (x5) 72 x 36 inches

ICOSA Window Dressing VII
Austin, TX, USA
Exhibition Dates: August 10 - 17, 2020

public (be)longing | SGMRT is a series of large textile panels based on a selection of Singapore MRT (subway) stations. Spanning the entire Singapore island with almost 200 kilometers of route, MRT stations are spaces where multiple publics interchange and also gather. They are connecting points both literally and figuratively. Taking visual and experiential direction from the MRT locations, we created the panels as tactile mapping devices for wandering and reflection about each station’s history and surroundings. Wander and discovery were critical to our research and process in 2017.

Traveling and exhibiting this series now, three years later, in today’s context of Covid-19, feels somehow strange and antithetical to our earlier expressions of public urban space. Busy urban interchanges have become foreboding. Underground and overground tubes carry risk, not the wonders of improvised connections. It feels oddly fitting that textile maps made for open interaction and touch hang silently behind a glass wall—almost like an open casket. We find ourselves longing for shared public spaces and dreaming of unplanned interactions with strangers.

MRT Stations: EW9 Aljunied, NS24 / NE6 / CC1 Dhoby Ghaut, CC29 / NE1 HarbourFront, DT12 / NE7 Little India, and CC2 Changi Airport

SITU Studio (Basar Girit, Jen Komorowski, Aleksey Lukyanov-Cherny, Westley Rozen, Bradley Samuels and Katie Shima), Jessica Blaustein, MTWTF, Rachel Meltzer, Christian Zabriskie, Lauren Comito, and Jesse Keenan

L+ was one of five interdisciplinary design teams selected to participate in Re-Envisioning Branch Libraries, a design study organized by the Architectural League of New York and the Center for an Urban Future in 2014.

-> SITU STUDIO website

-> The Architectural League of New York's Summary of L+ Proposal

How do our everyday interactions with our smart phones connect to bigger social, economic, and environmental issues? What are the relationships between our mobile devices and transportation infrastructures, for example? Between our smart phone packages and cultural attitudes towards dirt or disease? Between our personal data streams and rapid urbanization in India and China? Or between our information consumption patterns and global supply and removal chains?

TECHTRASH looks at the bigger pictures of e-waste. Through the lens of that single ubiquitous device, the smart phone, TECHTRASH investigates hi-tech waste as a complex form of trash and a fundamental component of broader cycles of information production, distribution, and consumption in the global cultural economy. Like the smart phone it follows, TECHTRASH has many parts. Some parts are tactile and can only be experienced off-line. Other parts are web-based, for digital display and circulation.

As tactile toolkit, TECHTRASH offers an object lesson that unpacks and recreates the iPhone box as a critical media object. Hand-crafted and comprising several interactive components, it is built to last and designed to circulate as both companion and counterpoint to our mobile phone consumption.

Credits
TECHTRASH was conceived and developed through Urban Media Lab: Waste, a graduate level seminar taught by Jessica Blaustein in the School of Media Studies at The New School in Spring 2014.

Collaborators
Jessica Blaustein, Director, B-PLOT, and Adjunct Professor, The New School

with
Colleen Doyle
Thea Chaloner
Daniel Creahan

and
Bria Cole
Ekaterina Emova
Nekoro Gomes
Carmel Pryor
Michael Reiss

Support
TECHTRASH is funded by a research seed grant from The New School Green Fund.

Thanks
Andrew Blum
Ariel Krasnow
Jay Shapiro

School of Media Studies, The New School, Spring 2014
Course Website
Supported by a 2013 Research Seed Grant from The New School Green Fund

> TECHTRASH

In the context of macroecological and financial crises that have dramatically shifted attention toward the management of multiple forms of garbage, excess and inefficiency, Urban Media Lab: Waste explores the cultural logics and politics of waste in contemporary urban life. Registered in terms of space (blight, sprawl, vacancy), time (waiting, boredom, drudgery), resources (refuse, trash), and increasingly in terms of digital information technologies (e-waste, obsolescence, “delete”), waste marks the residue, the left-over, the cast-off, the remainder, the damaged, the unclassifiable, the useless. Especially at a time when our virtual and material worlds are designed to streamline and optimize urban life at all scales – from operative landscapes to responsive systems to productivity software – our cultural definitions and regulations of waste are central to the ordering of our environments and ourselves.

The Spring 2014 Urban Media Lab focuses specifically on hi-tech waste through the dual lenses of data and device as a form of urban trash and as a fundamental component of broader cycles of information production, distribution, and consumption in the global cultural economy. In stark contrast to the mythology of the cloud that dominates commercial representations of digital communication, there is a growing awareness of the environmental impacts of information consumption through the energy footprints of data exchange and storage centers and the rising tide of digital devices that are as conspicuously discarded as they are consumed. With the support of a New School Green Fund award, seminar participants will investigate the profound material and spatial dimensions of the life cycles of information, and they will collaborate on a public project that visualizes the various possible waste streams of a single device.

Urban Media Lab is a project-based seminar focused around a specific urban condition. Approaching the city as an irreducible density of people, built environments, and information architectures, students explore a single topic from multiple disciplinary and media perspectives, and they collaborate on a final project for publication and/or exhibition. The seminar is structured around a combination of theoretical inquiry and site-specific case studies, and students are encouraged to use New York City as a laboratory for their expanded research and intervention. Past Urban Media Labs have focused on Strangers, Waste, and Traffic.

School of Media Studies
The New School
Spring 2012
Course Website

It is not possible to think about urban experience without thinking about traffic – the simultaneous, intersecting, and often alternatively frenzied or stalled movements of pedestrians, cars, trucks, bikes, planes, pets, packages, money, messengers, messages, and more. Urban Media Lab: Traffic will track circulations of bodies, objects, and data across the transportation and communication networks that make cities what they are. How has urban life historically been constituted by various forms of mobility? How do new forms of traffic emerge with different modes of economic, technological, and spatial development, and how do new models of efficiency in turn attempt to organize or control that traffic? What are the patterns and politics of traffic congestion and traffic jams along material and informational highways? Specific topics for investigation over the semester may include but are certainly not limited to: theories of density and urban form, automobile culture and privatization, traffic signals and signage, hyperurbanization, history of crowds and crowdsourcing, smart mobs, criminal trafficking, air traffic control, and navigational systems.

Urban Media Lab is a project-based seminar focused around a specific urban condition. Approaching the city as an irreducible density of people, built environments, and information architectures, students explore a single topic from multiple disciplinary and media perspectives. The seminar is structured around a combination of theoretical inquiry and site-specific case studies, and students are encouraged to use New York City as a laboratory for their expanded research and intervention. Course research is accompanied throughout by a range of art and design experiments that take up the topic as matter for critique, reuse, or reinvention. Past Urban Media Labs have focused on Strangers and Waste.

2013-14
Thread on cotton
11 x 8.5 inches

The New School
School of Media Studies
Spring 2011
Course Website
Seminar Files
Urban Research Catalogue

In the context of macroecological and financial crises that have dramatically shifted attention toward the management of multiple forms of garbage, excess and inefficiency, Urban Media Lab: Waste explores the cultural logics and politics of waste in contemporary urban life. Registered in terms of space (blight, sprawl, vacancy), time (waiting, boredom, drudgery), resources (refuse, trash), and increasingly in terms of digital information technologies (e-waste, obsolescence, “delete”), waste marks the residue, the left-over, the cast-off, the remainder, the damaged, the unclassifiable, the useless. Especially at a time when our virtual and material worlds are designed to streamline and optimize urban life at all scales – from operative landscapes to responsive systems to productivity software - our cultural definitions and regulations of waste are central to the ordering of our environments and ourselves. Grounded in an understanding of the city as the irreducible density of people, built environments, and information architectures, this seminar interprets the history of waste through the double lenses of urban development and media cultures.

2015
Thread on cotton
82 x 61 inches

Oftentimes, our personal identites are tied to places – places lived, imagined, remembered, left, or lost. All the Places I lived In New York City, or I Barely Knew You, throws into relief my own geographical patterns of belonging as a New York City dweller for almost two decades against the backrop of all those parts of the city I never knew at all. It is a record of settling that is also unsettling, because our identities are constituted as much by the places we don’t see as they are propped up by the ones that we do.

Photography: Laura Miller / Model: Haley Weiner

2015
Thread and string on cotton
60 x 78 inches

Subway Lines is a tactile drawing of the organized chaos that is New York City’s subway system. Thread lines travel routes with variable intensity through quilting lines that follow the creases and folds that occurred in the making. The quilt is a network that shapes and is shaped by its use and reuse. It is meant to be handled.

Photography: Laura Miller / Model: Haley Weiner

2016
Thread on tulle and textile scraps
15 x 8 inches

Each textile drawing in this series is made from a covering’s offcuts - all the trimmings, threads, and other miscellanea that were discarded in the process of its making.

2012-2014
Thread on cotton
~11/13 x 8.5/13 inches

2013
with Deborah Blaustein
Thread on cotton
52 x 41 inches

2013
with Deborah Blaustein
Thread on cotton and linen
38.5 x 53 inches

2013-14
Mixed media
14 x 11 inches

The New School
School of Media Studies
Fa 2009, Sp 2010, Fa 2011, Sp 2012
Course Website

2015
Thread on cotton
40 x 50 inches

2015
Thread on cotton
106 x 95 inches

2012
Thread on cotton
11 x 8.5 inches

The New School
School of Media Studies
Spring 2010
Course Website

Urban Media Lab: Strangers takes as its subject matter a figure that has been central to the modern urban condition since the emergence of mass media: the stranger. Real and imagined, the modern metropolis is defined by the presence and circulation of strangers. As spaces of encounter, relation, and interactivity that are shaped by a range of old and new media practices, cities have historically been both celebrated and reviled for their stranger relations, and strangers have functioned as complex sites for the negotiation of rights, property, and citizenship.

Through the figure of the stranger, students will investigate the roles that information and communication technologies play in shaping urban narratives of identity and belonging. How and why are strangers variously represented as benefits or threats to the city’s existing socio-spatial orders? How have such representations impacted the design and development of architectural and urban form? What are the impacts of personal communications devices and social softwares on our interactions with strangers in the networked city? In the context of these questions and others, students will be introduced to a range of art and design experiments, and to key texts in cultural and social theory, urban studies, and architectural history to explore critical issues and topics from surveillance to privatization to open source. This seminar is project-focused, and students will be encouraged to use New York City as a laboratory for expanded research and intervention.

University of Pennsylvania
Department of English
Fall 2003

Home can be a real place, a fond memory, a skeleton in one’s closet, a distant dream, or a glossy image in a trendy magazine. As aesthetic objects, status symbols, expressions of selfhood, and containers of values, houses and homes are dense with personal, social, and national meanings. Bridging American architecture and fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this course examines many different kinds of shelters – from mail-order homes to McMansions, suburban boxes to temporary cardboard dwellings, urban tenements to unbuilt experiments – to study the cultural and political significance of domestic spaces. We will explore the ideal of the detached private dwelling that powerfully emerges into the nineteenth century and persists today. And we will uncover other living arrangements that were built and imagined alongside and in tension with it. We will pay close attention to the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, and class figure into past and contemporary assumptions about what makes a good home and what breaks one. And we will critically examine divisions that are often taken for granted when we talk about homes: boundaries between private and public, between the personal and the marketplace, between the feminine and the masculine, between the individual and the social, and between one family unit and another.