I am a visual artist working at the intersection of land art, photography, cartography, and sculpture.  My kinetic glass sculptures and motion-activated site-specific installations create apparent portals in time, using motion-activated video projection and sound to excavate buried histories at sites where the passage of time has blurred collective memory.  I am a museum curator of digital art and time-based media and am always playing with “what’s next” in digital humanities and historical storytelling.

I am also the founder of Drift the Map, a series of experimental durational walk-happenings imagining urban walking as a form of time travel.  I invite the public regularly to join me in navigating the city using historical maps rather than current maps, or to re-enact significant walks from Atlanta history.  These happenings are inspired by the psychogeography concept of the dérive and Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and are led on behalf of the Museum of Design Atlanta and the urbanism activist group ThreadATL.

My work is intended as urban archaeology, recovering lost histories of our communities and drawing audiences to sites reverberating with ancestral memory—where the passage of time or intentional forgetting has blurred our vision of a shared humanity.  It is artwork that is unfinished until a viewer becomes an active participant in reenacting pivotal moments of liberation, bearing witness to long-past spasms of violence, or the peril of a fast-warming planet.

My work is informed by a past career as a former environmental lawyer and political organizer steeped in democracy work.  My work as both an attorney and artist takes the Civil Rights Movement’s dream of a “beloved community” as a starting point, in which a critical mass of people become committed to the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.  Love and trust might yet triumph over fear and hate.