Interview by Jimon

1) Where do you currently reside and work?
Brooklyn, NY.

2) How long have you been making art, and what led you to start?
I was that kid in first grade who could draw anatomically correct characters.

3) Do you remember the first piece of art you created? How old were you? Somewhere between the second and third grade, I built a replica of the Millennium Falcon’s cockpit in my bedroom.

4) Which school did you attend, and do you think it was necessary?
As a visual child, I maneuvered around academic hoops:
art school had no math requirements.

5) If you could go back in time and meet yourself when you were twenty, what would you tell yourself?   Let’s see, that would have been 1992… Buy property in Brooklyn.

6) Can you name any artist heroes, and tell us how they have affected your work?
My father, a real MacGyver: the man built a homemade raft with a modified motorcycle engine as an outboard motor to escape Cuba. Four days out at sea, with a homemade sextant, he made it to the states. Definition of “cojones.”

7) You work in multiple platforms. Which one is your favorite?
There is no hierarchy; they all equally work with my project.

8) You have a new series: Aqua Regia. Can you tell me the story behind its inception?  The American experience can be defined as a struggle to find meaning in the material before our bank accounts are vanquished. Traversing an intersection near my Brooklyn studio, noticing detritus impressed into the asphalt by the weight of ceaseless traffic. Rick Ross’s bare, sweaty chest moving in slow motion through a club, swaying gold chains frozen by strobing lights. I invented the technique while playing with a 300-ton hydraulic press. Gold chains are mark-making tools, used like paint or ink.

9) What other type of art interests you?
Cinema, cinema, cinema.

10) Do you listen to music while creating? If yes, what genre?
Depends on the day’s mood. Recently, bad, new-agey spa music oozes in the background, as I try to invoke the ghosts of dead abstract painters.

11) Best advise you ever received?
“Don’t go west, young man.”

12) If you could have dinner with three artists living/dead who would be at your table?  Carmen Herrera, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Wilfredo Lam.

13) What forthcoming projects or exhibitions do you have scheduled?       Upcoming projects in Vienna, Luxembourg, and Spain.