- It's very hard for me to describe what kind of an artist I am.

My reputation is for using large quantities of pre or post-consumer industrial materials.

Therefore, I am very much attached to what some people would call environmental art, or eco art, or land art.

And my reputation was built primarily around the large temporary pieces I did in natural settings, like forests.

In addition to other pieces in urban settings made of plastics.

However, I would not be doing this if aesthetics were not the primary motivation.

I remember driving by a really large pile of some kind of material that was tarped over, which was all held together by tires that were thrown over this thing.

There was just something about the aesthetic of that that appealed to me.

I started reading John McPhee's books on geology, and the linkage between materials and landscape, and what's known as deep time in geological circles, all started to fuse together for me.

Deep time is a phrase to separate human time, which could be today or last week, or your lifetime, or the life of our species, which is relatively short.

To separate that out from this greater time, the age of the planet, which is 4.5 billion years.

I've always felt that if one had an understanding of that, the difference between our time and deep time, that our collective response to the environment and how we go about, you know, inhabiting this planet, and what we do with it, would be much more profound.

That we'd have a much greater basis of understanding for what we're doing here and why we're here.

I was invited to do a piece for the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island.

And Staten Island was the home of the world's largest landfill.

They wanted me to do an outdoor sculpture of some sort, and I didn't really know what to do.

I hadn't done an outdoor piece in a number of years.

And I realized, well, why not use materials that are in the landfill?

Because the landfill is the new geology.

If there are humans or some species around 5 million years from now, they will have a material that is consolidated landfill.

And I finally decided on using newspaper.

It turned out to be a good medium in terms of technically what you could do with it, how you would build with it.

That first paper piece was built on Staten Island, and that led to probably 30 or more paper pieces that were sort of the foundation of what I was doing.

And I became the guy who did the paper pieces.

So the container pieces, they are a reflection of an interest in evolutionary biology, which was kind of a natural step from the geologic stuff.

In geology, gravity kind of limits form-making.

And being somebody who's interested in the generation of form, that was getting a little less interesting, and I wanted another model to work on.

In biology, when you look at an organism, like you, or me, or any organism, you can pick that up and throw it up in the air, and as long as you don't throw it too high, when it lands it will be intact.

Because the organizing principles are much more sophisticated than sandstone.

I started working with forms where I could package materials.

So the whole notion of a skin and a skeleton, and all this came into play.

The reactions would range from this is just a pile of trash to wow, that's really big.

Or how did he do that?

Or is that what I think it is?

And as the pieces got more sophisticated, and bigger, and more articulated, the wow factor really came into play.

I am of the belief that the wow factor, for lack of a better term, should be the introduction to any work of art.

That for it to be successful, a viewer had to be drawn to it.

Then, and only then, does all the interpretive stuff really come into play.

Biography, the large piece, that part of which was at the Albany Airport for six years, started in 2008.

And over the course of five years, Biography just kept growing to the left.

And if you look at it, you'll see it just evolves, evolves, evolves, and different materials come in and out of it.

Everything from paper, which is saturated with acrylic medium and is a mainstay in my work, to yarns, to electronics, to waste of various kinds, to plastics, to wood, tongue depressors, zip ties.

There's a million different things in there.

And my photographer would come once a year, and he would photograph the 30-feet that were on the wall because that was the length of the wall in the studio.

And after five years, we have an image of a piece that no one, including myself, has ever seen fully assembled.

I've seen 100-feet of it assembled, but I've never seen all 156-feet assembled.

That's only visible in the photograph, which to me is perfect, it's fascinating.

The fact that it has never been all assembled in one place at one time is its greatest strength.

And this is upside down.

People tell me I'm shooting myself in the foot.

People tell me where's it gonna fit?

And I have tried to explain it doesn't need to fit because it's a continuum.

And everything in our lives is part of a continuum.

(bright music) Currently, I'm working on a project No Wall is Big Enough, which had to be developed along with a book that carries the actual narrative.

So you see this huge image with all this incredible detail, but the detail can't really mean much, unless you're gonna spend weeks looking at this thing.

So the book, it doesn't explain it as much as it carries you through it.

These sections that I've worked on for the past year, they will fit into the overall image, but they're of a slightly different nature.

This piece not only goes from right to left and expands continuously, it also goes up and it also goes down.

So the piece physically is now something like 40-feet high, and I don't know, 60-feet wide.

No one has ever seen the entire thing assembled in one place at one time, including me.

There are approximately 140 sections now, of which only 21 fit on the wall.

Crazy, impractical.

Am I shooting myself in the foot?

Yes.

It scares away most people.

It scares away the art world.

They don't know what to do with this.

They want rectangles on the wall.

That's what they're used to selling.

I don't do rectangles.