Assemblage Artist
Ocean Park, Santa Monica, California
I want to talk about where I come from, because I think you can better understand my work if you understand the neighborhood that I grew up in. I was born and raised in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica in the 1950s, back when it was a blue-collar place full of Douglas Aircraft factory workers, fishermen, poets, beatniks, and refugees who had come west before and after World War II to escape Fascism. There weren’t many children around, so most of my neighbors were older adults. Ocean Park had also become a magnet for the early bodybuilding and physical culture movement in California, so some of my neighbors were younger adults, men and women chasing health and reinvention rather than raising families. That meant my childhood friends were mostly adults. I learned to listen to people and their stories before I learned much else, and that habit never left me.
Some of those neighbors had survived Nazi persecution. Others had lived through the Depression and two world wars. They didn’t talk about endurance as a theory. They simply lived it, every day, in small acts. From them I absorbed something that still drives my art: life is short and precious, so you had better live it fully, and you had better tell your truth about it.
I also grew up surrounded by an extraordinary quality of light. Ocean Park sits at the edge of the Pacific, on a slight hill facing the ocean, and the light there cuts sharp shadows across the bungalows and the sidewalks. That light has drawn artists to this neighborhood for over a century. I didn’t choose to notice it. It chose me. You could say light became my first language, long before I ever picked up a camera or assembled an artwork.
My father was a pattern-maker in the 1950s, building wood foundry molds for a living — precise, handcrafted objects made to give form to machines, used once and then discarded when the casting was done. Technology eventually made his trade obsolete, the way advancing technology always does. But his workshop is still here. I make my work in his former woodshop, in the same garage behind our family home. Foundry molds like what my father built show up in my assemblages now. Not as nostalgia, but as structure, and as an acknowledgment that the labor behind making things is worth honoring. Frameworks that once helped shape three-dimensional objects in metal are now helping me shape something else entirely.
That world — the coded, the unspoken, the things that existed at the edges of what was culturally permitted — runs through everything I make. I often work with vintage male physique photography from the 1950s, images that were, in their time, the only visual language available for expressing desire between men. They circulated disguised as fitness magazines and art studies. They were beautiful and subversive and necessary, and they survive now as fragments of a hidden history I refuse to let disappear. My other materials are almost always found, not fabricated: religious iconography, objects sourced from thrift shops, flea markets and online. The selection is always intentional and only incidentally decorative. When I place a sacred symbol alongside an erotic image, or frame an intimate portrait inside an industrial casting form, I am starting a conversation between objects that were never supposed to meet, and trusting the viewer to overhear it.
Humor matters to me. Visual puns often surface in the work because life is contradictory and often absurd, and art that refuses to acknowledge that is only telling part of the story. Artworks like CLOCK LOBSTER or PASS OR PLAY, both on view here today, aren’t less serious for being funny. If anything, the wit is what hopefully gets the viewer close enough for the other layers to land.
I owe a debt to the great California assemblage artist Ed Kienholz who encouraged me many years ago to make my art. I was a friend of his son Noah, and Kienholz saw something in how I looked at objects and told me to trust it. That encouragement from one of the form’s defining voices meant something I have never fully been able to articulate, except through the work itself.
Power and submission. Devotion and longing. Labor and loss. The sacred and the profane. These themes recur because they are part of the architecture of how we move through the world, and pretending otherwise has never interested me. I build the assemblage, fill it with history and contradiction, often wire it with light, and leave it open. Every piece is still, in some way, evidence of a memory traced back to that neighborhood, the conversations, the stories, the lives lived.
Selected Credentials
• Museum exhibition: “Some Assemblage Required: A Historical Look at Assemblage Art in L.A. County,” California Heritage Museum, Santa Monica, July 2026
• City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs LGBTQ Heritage Month Calendar and Cultural Guide, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2026
• Represented in fine art photography by Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica
• Guest Curator of photography exhibitions: Palm Springs Art Museum, Walt Disney Family Museum, California Heritage Museum
• Resident and working artist, Ocean Park neighborhood, Santa Monica
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