"In 2014, I participated in the AIRIE Residency in Everglades National Park, an experience that became foundational for my artistic practice. During and after the residency, I developed a series of performative, site-based works—boat tours, guided walks, hikes, and expeditions—that invited participants to experience landscapes often described as “untouched,” yet deeply shaped by human intervention. These projects positioned the artwork as an embodied encounter rather than a static object.
The Everglades revealed itself as a paradoxical landscape: rigorously protected as pristine nature, while simultaneously subjected to large-scale restoration efforts aimed at recreating an imagined 19th-century state—an ultimately impossible endeavor. This tension between preservation, tourism, environmental engineering, and historical amnesia became central to my work. I came to understand the Everglades not as wilderness outside culture, but as a constructed environment shaped by colonial ambition, military history, and contemporary ecological management.
Several works emerged from this research, including idealized 3D renderings of swamp landscapes and large-scale sunset images referencing Florida’s tourism advertising. These seductive visuals mirror promotional aesthetics while quietly embedding ecological fragility and loss.
This methodology later expanded into Empire Tour, a site-specific project guiding participants by canoe through New York’s industrial waterways, confronting iconic urban imagery with hidden infrastructures of waste, labor, and environmental neglect."
Favorite Everglades Memory
Sloughing, with one of the biologist, through the water and doing this amazing canoe tour during the Christmas days.
The Everglades revealed itself as a paradoxical landscape: rigorously protected as pristine nature, while simultaneously subjected to large-scale restoration efforts aimed at recreating an imagined 19th-century state—an ultimately impossible endeavor. This tension between preservation, tourism, environmental engineering, and historical amnesia became central to my work. I came to understand the Everglades not as wilderness outside culture, but as a constructed environment shaped by colonial ambition, military history, and contemporary ecological management.
Several works emerged from this research, including idealized 3D renderings of swamp landscapes and large-scale sunset images referencing Florida’s tourism advertising. These seductive visuals mirror promotional aesthetics while quietly embedding ecological fragility and loss.
This methodology later expanded into Empire Tour, a site-specific project guiding participants by canoe through New York’s industrial waterways, confronting iconic urban imagery with hidden infrastructures of waste, labor, and environmental neglect."
Favorite Everglades Memory
Sloughing, with one of the biologist, through the water and doing this amazing canoe tour during the Christmas days.