Over the last year I have been building a body of work around an architectural era that is disappearing from the American cityscape. The ironwork and moldings represented in these pieces hearken back to the American Renaissance and the Beaux-Arts movement of the turn of the twentieth century, which employed the conventions and characteristics of European Renaissance classicism to glorify the advent of a new Golden Age of progress through industrialism; a progress that itself constantly, necessarily and ironically shed all accoutrements of the past in order to advance and perpetuate its own motion. The White City of Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition represented one of the crowning achievements of the American Beaux-Arts movement, bringing the glory of Renaissance Europe and classical antiquity to the shores of Lake Michigan to create a temporary Neoclassical utopia of plaster and cement that stood for only six months, but which influenced the architecture of the City Beautiful movement for decades to follow. The White City's permanent presence in art and literature as well as the collective world consciousness is manifested in such cultural icons as L. Frank Baum's Emerald City and Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom, transforming this fleeting, long-vanished phenomenon into an Eternal City of sorts. It has also left another kind of legacy in the American city--the stone and ironwork it influenced in its era, often rusting beneath viaducts and crumbling over broken factory windows.

My work depicts these classical elements of Renaissance Europe as they have been reappropriated and recontextualized in the ever-changing interconnected landscapes of the American city and the American identity. In the United States, the stone and ironwork of the City Beautiful movement has often been allowed to disintegrate and disappear, sometimes very shortly after its commission. In Europe, architecture of the Renaissance has been preserved both structurally and contextually; but this, like its American counterpart, also recontextualizes the symbols of an earlier classical age in the service of new ideals and a new identity.

It is this confluence of the timeless and the temporal that lies at the heart of my work, a search for the unique intersections between the Golden Ages of classical antiquity and the rapidly crumbling remnants of a fading New Industrial Golden Age in the United States that may or may not have ever arrived.  My study of this architecture and its embellishments is pragmatic in nature, focusing on the function of classical ideals as they move through the time and space of our everyday life. In the next year, I will continue this study in the United States and Europe with the intent to create new monuments to a timeless conversation, situated at the interstice of the eternal and the ephemeral.