Installations

THANK YOU BAG

In the current ecological crisis—where landfills swell, oceans choke, and corporate guilt is repackaged as personal responsibility — THANK YOU serves as both bitter irony and soft lament. A phrase printed by the billion, re-contextualized as a quiet scream.

THANK YOU was constructed entirely by hand from clear plastic drop cloth—an industrial, utilitarian material typically used to protect surfaces during messy jobs. The plastic bag itself, is cheap, overlooked, and meant to be discarded. Each seam was carefully measured, cut, and heat-sealed to replicate the exact shape and proportions of the standard plastic “Thank You” bag, transforming a throwaway object into a labor-intensive monument.

The process was deliberately physical and slow—stitching together something that’s usually mass-produced in seconds. Every fold, handle, and crease was built to scale, with subtle distortions emerging naturally through the act of inflating a form never meant to be this size. The iconic red “THANK YOU” text was hand-rendered and applied, reclaiming it as something more confrontational.

Working with plastic to critique plastic creates a kind of conceptual loop—one that reflects the contradictions we all live with: we rely on the very materials we’re trying to escape. In that sense, the sculpture becomes both a product and a protest.

It’s an anti-monument, inflated not to celebrate but to expose—to make visible the systems of waste, convenience, and disposability that have quietly shaped our world.

' 25ft by 15ft Inflatable Sculpture: Thank You'

Featured in: TOLA - RECYCLED/FRAGILE MUSIC VIDEO FEATURE // February 9th, 2021

'Thank You' 25ft x 15ft inflatable sculpture featured in music video "RECYCLED/FRAGILE" by TOLA

Mateo Showcase// May 19th, 2016

Showcase Exhibition, Miláno exhibited a large scale installation "Thank You" a 20ftx15ft inflatable sculpture displayed deflated, and a video installation of three selected video works.

NEAR HOLY THINGS - SITE SPECIFIC INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE ART

Set against the decaying dream of the Salton Sea—a landscape once imagined as a resort paradise, now poisoned by agricultural runoff and abandonment—Near Holy Things unfolds as a ritual performance and sculptural installation that interrogates labor, land desecration, and the seductive illusions of glamour.

A hole is dug by hand into the desert floor. The displaced earth is mounded beside it, a small monument to the unseen labor and violence of extraction. A red carpet stretches across the dirt, absurdly pristine, leading not to a celebration, but to absence—a void. Next to the mound, the hole is sanctioned off with red velvet ropes, transforming it into a forbidden attraction, a sacred site, or perhaps a forgotten grave.

The installation mimics the language of celebrity, exclusivity, and spectacle. But instead of glamour, it offers erosion. Instead of arrival, it centers disappearance. In this landscape, the red carpet becomes a path toward confrontation—a silent procession toward the impact of human ambition and environmental neglect.

Near Holy Things mourns what was promised and never delivered: land repackaged as leisure, water commodified and poisoned, dreams built on displacement. By elevating the act of digging—a simple, ancient gesture—the work confronts the violence beneath progress and the illusion of the American Dream.

02/20/2017 - 03/20/2017

Near Holy Things//Performance and Installation// February 20th - March 20th, 2017 // Bombay Beach, CA// Sunrise - Sunset

DEFINED FIELD

Defined Field // December 12th, 2016 - December 12th, 2026 // Sunrise - Sunset

Defined Field is a multitude of site specific installations. The exhibition of each site will span over the course of one decade. The sites are comprised of preexisting elements: physical boundaries, spacial relationships, natural and manmade structures, landscapes, textures, smells, and inhabitants that are being re-contextualized. By assigning a conceptual boundary to the specific site, the site itself becomes the material of its own representation. Over the course of the exhibition each site will naturally evolve with time into new compositions. Once the exhibition period is over, the site will no longer exist in that context even if it may still exist.