This pop-up experience explores demolition material at its origin – a gutted Manhattan loft apartment temporarily transformed into a gallery showcasing all the detritus from its renovation.   Click HERE for a short documentary film about this event.

Over 400 people visited DEMO-DEMO during the week it was open in October 2018, including tours offered as part of Open House NY.

Demo-Demo was featured in this Gothamist article as well as in this clip on the local TV News Channel 11 WPIX.

Demo-Demo was an act of resistance – a demonstration – against conventional construction cycles of disposal and acquisition, hitting the pause button post-demolition to examine this material for its latent potential.

Guests wandered among artfully arranged piles and stacks of demolished wallboard, electrical conduit, plumbing parts, insulation, windows, cabinets and other materials.  This interaction exposed the challenges and possibilities with this material.  It was intended to titillate both voyeurs (think ruin porn) and designers looking for inspiration. 

Is there another fate for this material besides eternity in a landfill?  Can some of this stuff be repurposed into something wonderful?

The Back-Story:

Buildings are responsible for half of the carbon emissions influencing climate change.   Designers have made great strides in reducing buildings’ “operating energy” by adopting energy-saving strategies (efficient appliances, solar panels, minimizing thermal leakage in envelope designs, etc.).  The new frontier is exploring strategies to minimize the embodied energy of a building’s materials.  Re-using existing material can dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of new construction.

Simultaneously, cities are adopting zero landfill objectives – New York City’s goal is zero waste to landfills by 2030.  Construction/demolition debris comprises 60% of the material headed to NYC’s landfills.  The sheer bulk of detritus from this apartment renovation is impressive, demonstrating the magnitude of this challenge.

Demo-Demo called attention to both issues, for visitors and for those who experienced it through press coverage and the documentary.  Can we mitigate our landfill problem while minimizing embodied energy of our buildings?

When I was leaving my career in finance and assembling a portfolio to apply to architecture school, friends suggested I include a self-portrait as art students often do. It didn't make it into the portfolio, but I found time to design this quilt using neckties I would no longer have to wear.

My friend Lauren Antinello generously sewed the quilt using 88 of my old ties. We put it in a frame we found in the attic, and it now proudly hangs in our parlor.

It became yet another exercise in finding new lives for found materials.

wREath, my first solo art show, attempts to show the aesthetic possibilities of waste material in a series of seasonal wreaths I composed to decorate our home for the holidays.

These pieces are confessional: all of these materials were generated by normal routines in our daily lives. Handling these items makes me aware not only of their latent possibilities but the sheer volume of waste we generate. Despite our best efforts to consume less and live more sustainably, it is almost impossible to avoid participating in wasteful systems of acquisition and disposal.

There was a staggering amount of styrofoam packing materials generated by a recent move and related purchases of new electronics. Despite unsubscribing from print catalogs and magazines, we still receive college alumnae publications and professional mailings. While we always bring our own reusable bags to shop, significant quantities of plastic bags still show up with deliveries, dry cleaning, and guests. Renovation generates tons and tons of demolition waste, even with focused attempts to reuse material in new construction. And we receive single-use amenity kits whenever we travel overseas. These waste materials were accumulated and transformed into decorations

The exhibit will be open during December 2020 at Rockland Center for the Arts.

Found Round is a temporary sculpture made from found objects: plastic bottle caps used in our home over several months and saved, a circular glass table top (formerly our coffee table) and a broken mirrored pedestal rescued from our attic.

This was assembled for an exhibit at the Rockland Center for the Arts in May 2019.

I was honored to be featured as artist of the week.

Our vacuum cleaner broke.

The repairman said it would be cheaper to replace it than to repair it. We took his advice and bought another one -- the path of least resistance.

But it bothered me that discarding the old blue vacuum, useful for 20 years, would condemn it to spend eternity in a landfill.

Its useful life was short. Plastic is forever.

Charlotte Mouquin asked me to make a table centerpiece for a gala dinner for the Pelham Arts Center. The theme was "bloom." So I took apart the vacuum, exploring opportunities to give it a second life by finding another use for its eternal materials. The old blue vacuum blossomed into something new ...

We owe it to our planet to explore new uses for old materials.

Acrylic Mirror, NY Times Newsprint

Exhibited at Full Circle Show, Rockland Center for the Arts

The brief for this exhibit called for a circular piece of art inspired by a section cut of a tree felled on the grounds of the art center.

I realized a tree’s cross section cut serves as its obituary – disclosing its age and major life events.

I habitually read obituaries and decided to make a receptacle to house all the obituaries from my hometown paper, the New York Times, over the course of a single week. Holes of various sizes were laser-cut into a double layer of acrylic mirror, and the printed obituaries cut from the newspaper were rolled up and inserted into these holes. There are more holes than obituaries, since many of us do not receive this honor. The act of cutting, rolling and inserting these memorials felt intimate, akin to a religious gesture, like placing a prayer note in a crevice of a wall or at a temple. Reading obituaries provokes self-reflection, hence the use of mirror as the material for this piece.

Masonry Blocks (1925): Plywood drawer (1979); PVC pipe (2012); Wood, paraffin wax, candles (2018)

Part of a series of sculptures composed from construction detritus, Re3-Spect is an exploration of formal possibilities generated by waste material. It was exhibitedd at Rockland Center for the Arts in December 2018.

An interior demising wall was demolished during a gut renovation of a loft apartment in Manhattan’s garment district. Masonry blocks were shattered, revealing the original 1925 blocks encrusted with generations of mortar, plaster and paint. All 36 tons of material generated during demolition were formed into 33 sculptures displayed into the newly gutted space, which was temporarily transformed into a pop-up gallery exhibit in October 2018 titled “DEMO-DEMO.” These randomly broken blocks were horizontally arrayed, incorporated into an installation called “Rubble Caldera.” This sculpture was dismantled in November, with the bulk of the material carted to a demolition waste recycling center in Brooklyn. Selected materials from the exhibit were saved for re-use as construction material in the loft renovation, re-use in other construction projects via a re-use center, or re-purposed as art.

These blocks were saved and formed into a second sculpture, a linear centerpiece for a holiday party in early December. Inserting candles in the tubular voids generated a new language of light and melted wax.

Building on these discoveries, the blocks were arrayed for a third time in a four-sided sculpture fused on a new wood base with paraffin wax. Re3-Spect is intended to honor this material, giving it another life instead of dooming it spending eternity in a landfill.

The use of candles to demonstrate respect quotes religious honorific typologies, such as offerings to saints or gods in churches and temples. It uses 60 candles, a premonition of a birthday cake for my upcoming milestone birthday. Evoking ancient ruins which have been transformed by the ravages of time, it is intended to evolve as candle wax drips and overflows …

I continue to make at least 2 wREaths each holiday season, using waste materials generated by our daily lives.

2023: single-use plastic containers

2022: architectural drawings and laser cut model blanks

2021: old “business attire” shirts and old lady buttons