INTERNAL COMBUSTION

My work begins with the skeleton, our first infrastructure.

Skeletons, vascular systems, root networks, rivers, reefs are examples of infrastructures crafted by nature to support life. Long before we build roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, or cities, nature builds the structure that allows us to stand, move, sustain ourselves with food, water, and air. Our skeletal bones literally are minerals from the earth transformed into structure.

Movement and health enabled our ancestors to dream-up and create infrastructures that enhance their lives, bequeathing these structures to next generations. The infrastructures each generation was left accumulated, were improved or considered obsolete and abandoned.

I contemplate the sacrifices and efforts that countless generations poured into building societies’ infrastructures. I wonder whether those efforts are being honored, transformed into something worthwhile, and what might yet emerge from all that accumulated labor.

I marvel at the different expressions of natural and human-made infrastructure, and the interplay between these two forms of creative energy.

Torrance Art Museums’ NOMAD 2026 exhibition

Two skeletal figures inhabit a quiet moment. The "organs" of the elder are comprised of systems that support the operation of a functioning miniature internal combustion engine integrated into its skeletal structure.

Internal combustion engines have become deeply embedded within the infrastructures that sustain modern life.

The steel that forms these figures was once rock. Transforming that rock into sculpture required mines, mills, transportation networks, and countless people—an interconnected infrastructure that depends largely upon internal combustion engines.

The installation presents an engine as one organ within a larger collection of fuel, electrical, and pneumatic structures. Fuel and air enter the engine. Emerging from this transformation are mechanical power, heat, and a stream of hot combustion gases—the products of a process that has profoundly shaped the modern world.

Like all living and mechanical systems, the engine and it’s organs depend upon relationships beyond itself. Fuel, air, electrical power, and cooling are needed to sustain the operation of this infrastructure. Like all living and mechanical systems, the engine depends upon relationships beyond itself. No energetic transformation exists in isolation.

Every energetic transformation is sustained by, and ultimately returns something to, the larger ecological systems of which it is a part.

From this simple functional system, embedded within a skeletal infrastructure, we can begin to contemplate the countless infrastructures humanity has created. What is required to bring them into existence, and what is required to sustain them? Whom do these infrastructures serve, and how do they shape the lives of those who depend upon them? Do they exist in dynamic balance with the biosphere that sustains them?