2017–present · Installation · Solo exhibition, Coral Sea: The Unsung Battle of the South Pacific, Alfa Romeo Tango, Battleship USS Iowa Museum, San Pedro, 2019. Curated by Ben Jackel.
Coral Sea begins with an image derived from naval blueprints and reconfigured into a speculative structure that merges elements of opposing wartime technologies. Drawing on family history on both sides of the Pacific War, it combines forms from a U.S. submarine, components of a Japanese aircraft carrier, and infrastructural elements tied to passage and departure. Through line, density, and repetition, these references grow into coral-like accretions, turning an engineered diagram toward organic form and blurring the line between machine and organism.
The work expands into a multi-part installation aboard the battleship USS Iowa, set within a former passageway converted into a gallery. It brings together the blueprint image, a hand-built propeller model, framed family photographs from American and Japanese lineages, a fictional postage stamp that imagines the Coral Sea as a geopolitical entity, and a series of lithographs in the tonal register of shin hanga.
Across these elements, systems of navigation, representation, and memory are translated and recomposed. Parallel wartime perspectives share one space, where histories of opposition coexist and intertwine, reflecting on the fragile, contingent nature of fate.
eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific
Digital collage prints on paper
Coral Sea
2017–present
Installation
Alfa Romeo Tango, Battleship USS Iowa Museum, San Pedro
The Coral Sea lithograph is held in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Related: eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific, a series of digital collage prints, and oil spill, a series of paintings from the Coral Sea project.