Installation

INSTALLATION

TrashFormations

2024 – 2025

120″ x 156″ x 156

Used furniture frames, packing pallets acrylic, plastic, cardboard, paper trash, fabric, resin

TrashFormations is my attempt to navigate the fine line between transforming trash and allowing it to remain what it is, grounding the work not in grand global themes but in the overlooked environments of roadsides, alleyways, and parking lots. Influenced by artists such as Nevelson, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp, I work with the common and discarded while still pursuing beauty, using context as a central material—removing objects from dumpsters and streets so the viewer can truly see what has long gone unseen. Shaped by my 50-year career in interior design and its traditions of shaping domestic space through patience, craft, and countless decisions, TrashFormations continues the historical role of interiors by using everyday furniture and salvaged materials to reflect our time, place, and society, and to reveal something unexpectedly beautiful. For a full description click here.

Want Less / Give More

2024 – 2025

120″ x 156″ x 156

Used furniture frames, packing pallets acrylic, plastic, cardboard, paper trash, fabric, resin

Want Less / Give More emerged from a period of personal transition following a visit to Guatemala before Covid, when witnessing profound inequity led me to simplify my own life in order to give more fully, marking a continuation of a long spiritual and ethical reckoning that began years earlier. The installation confronts the uncomfortable truth that growth and empathy often arise from pain rather than happiness, asking viewers to face the moral tension between generosity and indifference, and the haunting question of “WHY ME?”—why some are compelled to see and respond to injustice despite knowing it cannot be fully resolved. Through reclaimed materials, direct language, and forms that reference religious, domestic, and communal spaces, the work invites reflection, participation, and self-examination around responsibility, compassion, and the contradictions of human existence.For a full description click here.

Count Your Blessings

2019 | 102″ x 172″ x 24″

resin on wood panels, acrylic panel with pin mounted letters, sconces with painted lampshades, glass beverage container, plastic cups, silver plated tray with cookies, chairs with embroidered seats

This is a complex assemblage piece using various symbols and multiple methods of construction. The numerology of the target panels–7,8,9–is reflected in the “haiku” like verses on the cabinet panels and the decoration on the lamp shades. The side chairs also have embroidered verses. The hidden conversation about money and blessings is reflected in various elements including shortbread “cookies” on a central tray made with shredded money.

Portrait Of A Young Man | Adam von Dolle

Portrait of A Young Man

2019 | 86” x 104” x 22”

digital print on canvas, oil paint, antique chest of drawers, antique side chairs, antique bronze lamps, custom lampshades, bronze cast skull, plexiglass

After a trip to visit a Guatemalan philanthropic organization, I became interested in the relationship of contemporary gang violence and historical colonialism. The violence that arrived with the European explorers and later revisited in the Latin American land wars. The history of colonial violence today generationally lives in the history of regional gang violence. As I researched both gang imagery and portraiture in art history, I was struck by the similarities in a painting by Giovani Battista Moroni and a photograph of a leader of the Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13 gang. In light of this coincidental intersection, I developed an assemblage of a renaissance gang portrait, “tattooed” 19th century Italian chest and 19th century bronze lamps with lampshades, along with other elements correlating to my research into these subjects.

Child’s Play

2019 | 102″ x 48″ 12″

plaster, plastic, wood panels, resin, latex rubber, LED lights, mirrors.

Child’s Play came about as I started to work with gun imagery and required three-dimensional guns. I found that it was not responsible to use real, functioning guns in the work, so I began to buy toy assault rifles. It wasn’t until I was telling someone that I was buying these toys through the internet that it struck me, I was indeed buying these “toys” on the internet… which were being marketed as “great gift ideas”. The more that I looked at the various toy guns for sale the more I noticed a pattern of the same sales pitch along the lines of: “your kids will love spending hours playing with these realistic toy assault rifles”. Each gun had a manufacturer’s recommended age, typically 3 years and up, but generally only because there are small, swallowable parts in the toy assault rifle that could lead to choking. However, I came to find the idea that the only hesitation with recommending an age limit was the precaution of a child swallowing a small part, not the aggressive and deadly behavior which is inherently encouraged in its use.

J Edgar

2019 | 80″ x 80″ x 22″

photography, wood panels, vintage furniture, modern chairs, replica Tommy Gun, marble

This work explores the ideas of freedom and government. The backdrop is a photograph taken of the Berlin Wall, a potent and popular symbol of the people’s will over oppressive governments. On top of this, an altered archival photograph of J. Edgar Hoover aiming a tommy-gun becomes a foil to the German experience. Nazi tattoos and lipstick position governmental authority as corrupt and suspect. A beaded tommy-gun sculpture demonstrates the ease by which the ugly can be disguised as beautiful. The cabinet case it sits upon, and the chairs that flank it are covered in the same photograph used in the backdrop, with the words LOVE and HATE mounted to back of each as if to suggest the viewer must choose an option.

Guns & Roses Lounge II

2019 | dimensions variable

furniture, umbrellas, dumpster, lights

A spatial and thematic experience where every surface is covered in a variation of the same fabric printed with “guns and roses” imagery taken from previous sculptures. The space created provided a place to sit, but not to get too comfortable, while talking about the difficult ideas presented within the exhibition A Question of Morals.