I have taught martial arts for twenty years, built a school by hand, taught its instructors, and run youth programs in schools and community centres. My work treats fighting as innate rather than aberrant. It cannot be removed from a person, only refined, and it cannot be refined alone.
Current work includes First Supper, a dinner series recorded with the consent of everyone at the table, and a plexiglass installation that splits a familiar surface in two so what sits behind it becomes visible through the gaps.
Make the familiar known
Fighting is an appetite we're all born with, and it's so constant we stop noticing it, the way we stop noticing gravity. A baby fighting to be born, an argument with yourself at midnight over whether to open the fridge, two countries at war: the same appetite at different volumes. Someone is always paying for where we stand with it, usually someone who had no part in choosing. Fighting can't be removed, only refined, and it can't be refined alone. Refinement is the path between fighting others for ourselves, and fighting ourselves for others, walked in both directions for a lifetime, never arrived at.
Where the subject comes from
I grew up in a project neighbourhood in Toronto, in a single-parent home. I drew on my schoolwork and made toys out of trash, which is the first honest thing I can say about the practice: I have always built from whatever was already lying around. Source Abstract is wire coat hangers. Me Instrument in the We Orchestra is egg cartons from the recycling bin, made with my two sons during the pandemic.
I studied at the Etobicoke School of the Arts, and learned as much painting graffiti on walls in west Toronto and airbrushing motorcycle tanks. I turned down a place at the Ontario College of Art and Design and drove tractor-trailers instead, close to a million miles across Canada, the United States and Mexico by my mid-twenties.
I came to martial arts in my twenties looking for a way to manage anger and anxiety. That is where the subject came from, and it is why I treat fighting as something everyone is born carrying rather than something that happens to other people. I opened my first school in 2003, closed it, tried to stop teaching, then built the school I run now by hand out of an empty shell, having sold everything I owned. Thirty years of training since, thousands of students, and programs in public and private schools and community centres, including one school partnership running weekly since 2012.
Most of what I know came out of the parts that went wrong. Errors provide the heartbeat, the rests between the notes.
Artist Statement
Read the full artist statement, the version that goes out when a gallery, a grant or a residency asks what the work is about.
Unit ⑧ Membership Program
A viewer completes a visual piece. That isn't a compliment to the audience, it's how the work functions. Refinement cannot be done alone, and neither can this: the work needs someone to extend toward and retrieve from, over and over. Without that it stays unfinished. You can learn more about Unit 8 and be a member.