Because I didn’t go to a traditional art school, I kind of fell backward into sculpture. I always had to lean into function. The things I make have to serve a function — or have motion — whether that means the thing has an engine or is alive, or that it functions in so far as it tells a good story with a beginning, middle, and end.

I always lean towards a vestige of experience: I did this thing in my life that was caused by X, Y, and Z and resulted in A, B, or C.

From the ages of eighteen to twenty-one —instead of going to college — I worked in the studio of the sculptor Tom Sachs. Tom famously makes functional sculptures, but he would quote Muhammad Ali: “It ain’t bragging, if you can back it up.” I took that to heart. I consider it with anything I’m making — I have to be able to “back it up” and have an honest connection with the object that I’m getting people to engage with. I want to respect their time and attention, especially as I’ve chosen an art practice that allows me to take my hobbies and launder them into the work.

It started with zine making. In my teens to early twenties, I just tramped for years. I was really into hitchhiking and taking buses. I would save up three hundred bucks to fly to Europe and crash outside for a few months. I started making zines as a way to capture being a fuck-up transient and synthesize it into a finished product, into an artwork. I think that’s where I first started laundering my hobbies into a practice. So I went from travel to pigeons, to serving street food, and now to farming.

Yeah, and I strive, especially now that I’m in my thirties, to have a practice that can bring everyone into the experience. Making art can be a really personal and isolating endeavor, but when it comes time for the exhibition, I try as hard as I can to bring everyone in. That’s why I always prioritize serving food, some bizarre food that I craft myself. The specific dish helps weave together the concepts and themes present in the show.

I’ve always had a lot of friends who are musicians and something I really admire about their art form is audience retention. When you go see a concert, everyone’s in it, everyone’s listening, focused on the art, connected to the artists, and dancing. But when you go to a sculpture show, you walk through, look at the stuff, and five minutes later you’re outside talking to your friends about something else entirely. You’re quickly out of the experience. I try to have a lot of fun when I’m making art — I want that to extend to the show and not just be something I do in private.

Yeah, “Iconic Vehicles from Icon Films,” like the snowcat from the end of “The Shining.”

And in the famous Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard!

Nowadays I spend a lot of my time farming in the Catskills and part of being a farmer is becoming a gear-head. I have tractors and all of these funny vehicles, and that’s my day-to-day experience. So I want to talk to people about tractors and trucks, but that’s a hard conversation to have with all of my city people. So for that show in L.A., I decided to leverage cinema, which is maybe the single strongest driver in contemporary society of our collective imaginations. Maybe people haven’t ridden a John Deere lawnmower, but everyone — or everyone who has good taste in film — has seen “The Straight Story,” David Lynch’s masterpiece about an old, ailing farmer riding his John Deere across Iowa. So in sculpting those things, I was able to pull from my lived experience but tap into a broader collective imagination. I love things that live in our collective imagination — funny vehicles or pigeons, or growing flowers — there are thousands of years of human experience in raising flowers, which I think is even more special. I’m trying to make more art that participates in timeless hobbies.

In 2018, my wife and I took over a little former goat farm in the Catskill Mountains. We couldn’t afford a house, so we bought a barn, and I slowly built an apartment inside it. My wife Maddy is a professional gardener at Brooklyn Botanic, she’s a superstar horticulturist. And now we’ve spent six years sticking our hands in the dirt every morning, building soil, and cultivating fields and a vineyard and orchards. Toiling in the dirt is the natural next phase of my ecologically focused art practice.

Cultivating life is a deep and rewarding ritual.

Yeah, that’s a little reductive to me. I think of my animal husbandry as more stewardship than ownership. But I will say that I am interested in that tension in the politics of “keeping” animals. I’ve raised thousands of pigeons on my roof. It’s a serious pursuit requiring responsibility and attention. A unique and special detail in raising and flying pigeons is that these animals are free. They only come back if they’re happy, otherwise, they’ll go a block over to another pigeon coop or go live with the park pigeons. The reason people raise pigeons is to watch them bob, weave, and arch around the sky. It’s beautiful. And that’s the takeaway. I give them food and water every day, and they give me acrobatic performance art. They are not livestock.

And we’re not taking their flesh or eggs or fur or whatever. I think it parallels farming flowers. I’m not necessarily growing them to consume them and eat them, it’s more about food for the spirit and contributing to local ecology.

Yeah, way more experiments in this. I totally got the wine bug. I’m captivated by the farming of grapes and the science of making wine in all of these different parts of the world. We’ve been planting hundreds of grape vines. As with pigeon-flying, there are countless localized styles dependent on terroir, or hyper-local manifestations of style and tradition. Brooklyn is full of people making wine in their apartment basements, largely using all these tweaker New York breeds of grapes.

I think for the next show that we have together at Entrance, I’ll be on the street outside the opening with a big barrel of my shitty high-acid red wine and be topping off people’s glasses with a long wine pipet.

I want to say one thing about why I think hot dogs are cool. It’s the same thing about pigeons and everything in New York. They make hot dogs all around the world. They make sausages almost everywhere, and each culture has its own version. But the most iconic sausage is a New York dirty-water dog from a stainless steel street cart. That’s the most famous sausage in the world, and it’s so shitty. It’s similar to pigeons. Pigeons are the New York mascot, even though the pigeons here are pretty scuzzy. Despite everywhere else in the world having pigeons, in New York, they’re a part of our culture. I love that type of New Yorker-ism. New York also has its own fucked-up wine culture with all these hybrid grape varieties. They’re crosses between European grape breeds and native New York grape breeds — think crossing Pinot Noir with Welch’s Concord to make grapes that can grow in the extreme cold. I love that New York has its own way of doing these things that are kind of classic. They’re international classics, and New York’s got its own style.