Recent Works
I work with the solid or “verifiable” research that enables rich knowledge of histories, people and places, as well as the speculative ones that allow us to make knowledge from fragments and stories, ultimately allowing us to question colonial narratives of history making. My recent work, while materially and thematically distinct from each other, creates new archives: edited sound recordings as an aural map of time; hand printed paper ephemera to explore borders and spirituality; a fictive film in order to unpack our relationship to extraction. I live in the almost imperceptible fracture between the real and imagined in Kingston, NY. I teach Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design.
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Through a series of letters to my ancestors and fragments of archive derived from extensive genealogical and academic research, I explore modern notions of borders, trauma, colonization and the fabrication of whiteness. Each “book” is in fact six different booklets with no bindings, all folded into different forms to match various paper ephemera (map, letter, passport, postcard accordion, etc) as an archive of thoughts and research on migration, religion, home and resistance. All paper for one dossier are derived from the dimensions of one parent sheet. One hundred dossiers made from one hundred sheets. The folder that holds them all introduces their theme and material, as well as the significance of folding and unfolding.
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My 2025 solo show at Nikki at Mehle in LA exploring my ongoing Big Lith project.
Over the past few years, my work has been attuned to ecological transformation caused by extraction, especially in the high deserts of the Southwest. In 2023, I worked on a botanical survey of a 450 square mile valley in Nevada whose future may be in jeopardy. I was invited there as an artist who had previously made work providing space for people to publicly grieve the overdose crisis.
As such, I have developed a speculative, fictitious film concept to examine America’s modern dependence on extraction as it decimates the natural world. Through my investigations of renewable energy, grief and de-growth movements, I constructed a fictional narrative of a 2012 science fiction film, entitled Big Lith, that relates American reliance on extraction to a surveillance state, but wasn’t distributed due to shadowy, moneyed interests. As an extension of the speculative film itself, I fabricate objects, texts, sound and other ephemera from this film whose existence I’ve devised, then install them in urban galleries in order to engage the public in conversations about our endangered ecosystems.
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My personal field recordings of the music that surrounds us—from New York to New Mexico to New Orleans and everywhere in between and outside: street sounds, deep listening, nature’s rhythms and unauthorized live music recordings edited to create a harmonious, psychedelic soundscape for your aural pleasure. Ideal tape for laying on the floor—behold as life sonically drifts around you for one hour.
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Research and writing on the continuous Big Lith project, exploring High Desert ecosystems and our cultural reliance on extraction.
Unfolding Complication
Published fall 2025
Zibby Jahns: Forecasts & Elegies
Images from 2025 solo show at Nikki at Mehle Gallery
Sounds and music include: Neal Todten’s Music in Sweet Motion, rain in NM, rain in NOLA, rain in Nevada, Kaethe’s synthesized violin Impressions of Ethiopia, C-Section-8, a tape player that only plays backwards, Chad manually revolving vinyl, the Filipino grocery store in Vallejo, violin on the platform of NYC’s subway, auctioneer of trash in Springville, protests for Palestine, Eastern Medicine Singers with Lee Renaldo and Yonatan Gat at West Kortright, chimes of the Laney flea market, Jesy’s beats at Hecco’s house, brass music on the streets of New Orleans, Lazar dj’ing at the Avalon, Jonathan talking about slowed down opera on zoom while my kettle whistles, a walk in the woods and dozens of live music recordings I will be infringing upon copyright to mention.
Bootleg Life Soundtrack
HDTS @ A-Z West
I spent January 2026 researching, writing, drawing and developing characters for my ongoing speculative film project about extraction and high desert ecologies, Big Lith, as a work trade resident at High Desert Test Sites, preparing for an upcoming show.
Non-Traditional Theater
Performative Sculpture
Site-Specific Performance
Drawing
Inhabited Sculpture
Photography