I relocated to New York in 2003…
I relocated to New York in 2003 to pursue a curiosity and interest in contemporary art. When I arrived here, I earned an income continuing to work in digital imaging and print production for artist and fashion professionals alike. Working alongside top NYC creative professionals was not as creative as I had initially imagined, however, and in 2010 I made a break from the industry and committed to developing a deeper critical art practice. It was also around this time that my beginnings as a teacher came about when assisting a friend with a summer camp program in South Slope, Brooklyn. I subsequently joined The Olive Treehouse Group as a substitute in 2011 and later became an assistant teacher, working part time within their early childhood integrated classrooms while maintaining a conceptual art practice in parallel.
In 2012 I presented my first sound/noise installation, Corridor Piece, to an audience of faculty and students from the Yale sculpture and architecture departments in New Haven, CT. This picture is the only documentation of the ephemeral event taken during the day of installation inside a semi vacant industrial building.
Without going into the underpinnings of this work in detail, the basis of the piece contends with notions of ‘new meaning’ from the perspective of how information (aural: noise) is received, patterned, and interpreted in our brains. It’s a sensorially focused work in the sense that the listener participants later shared their differing experiences of zen, ecstasy, and anxiety. And I certainly used that artwork when forming it, and live, to encounter aspects of my own character.
Similarly to when I was observing children in the classroom presenting behaviors differing from their peers in how they process sensory experiences and uniquely organize the world around them. I would often be the one to directly assist these children with autism because of my own growing capacity as a teaching assistant, quality of attention when focusing on individualized care, and capacity to understand the world in abstract and multi-sensory ways. And throughout 11 years working in classroom settings I was able to comprehend and connect with numerous neurodiverse children, ages 3-5, which I now continue to realize through my private 1:1 sessions in practice and support to the spectrums of autism community in Brooklyn, NY.