Women in Bakken
In 2012 and 2013, an oil boom took place in the Bakken Shale Formation in North Dakota, due to technological advances in hydraulic fracturing (fracking). The area was crawling with men working 100 hour weeks, earning up to $120,000 per year, living in trailer parks (called “man camps) where rent cost nearly as much as a […]
Oil and Water
In Oil + Water, Shanna Merola and I combined our photographic work from the water struggle in Detroit and Flint, Standing Rock, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, New Orleans post-Katrina and the Bakken Shale fracking boom in North Dakota. The resulting body of work asks viewers to contemplace connections between extractive industries, militarization of police, […]
Fate of the Machinery
My family owned an industrial auction business from 1951-2002, liquidating the assets of factories, in towns across the US facing plant closures amidst a wave of runaway shops, mergers and acquisitions and corporate conglomeration. Every week, their company, Norman Levy Associates, would place Sunday advertisements in the Detroit News/Detroit Free Press for upcoming auctions. The […]
The Roar on the Other Side of Silence
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” -George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-72 Roar on the Other Side of Silence was commissioned by the University […]
Observed: Hypervisibility and Reclamation
Observed was an installation realized with Halima Cassells and Tawana Petty at Haverford College Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Using Detroit as a case study, it explores the contradictions we face when surveillance is conflated with safety; when law enforcement agencies, governments, businesses, and institutions leverage digital and biometric technologies to track us, as well as our […]
The Sound Underground
In cities like Baltimore, Detroit and New York City, over 75 percent of once free-flowing streams have been buried to make way for development. But many of these streams still run underground. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Coldbrook Creek rushes beneath the city, traversing human-made boundaries. Through a series of audio markers along the hidden creek’s […]