The City of Phoenix (as well as many other cities) is going through an extreme period of growth. My bus ride to work from downtown Phoenix to downtown Tempe goes along the line where a new light rail system is being built. The streets, buildings and sidewalks along these routes are in constant disarray - being torn apart, dug into, refilled, paved over, dug into again etc. Everything that once appeared stable is a pile of rubble. The physical destroying, deteriorating and rebuilding of the city reflects that thought processes gone into creating the city into an image we believe we can temporarily live in. The rubble around us is the rubble in our minds.

I began photographing these piles of rubble as well as collecting pieces from them. I take the photographs and create diagrams of them, with a point made for each piece of rubble. The points are connected where the pieces of rubble touch. The disarray is made to seem orderly. Structure within apparent lack of structure.

This process came together in a larger piece using 12 of these diagrams scribed into a large piece of plexiglass with strings coming out from each point. In the process/performance each string was tied to the collected pieces of rubble and formed into a new pile of rubble that has it's own stable and unstable aspects. The pieces of the city that have been broken apart from their originally intended form return to raw materials used to rebuild. As this was physically rebuilt we mentally form a concept of place, of what is right and what we think should be discarded.