Artist Statement

Bay Area Hyper Naturalism is a permanent glass, ceramic, and marble installation at the Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at the San Francisco International Airport. The project was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission and is in the public art collection of the City and County of San Francisco, CA. 

The airport is an in-between space. Travelers move in and out in a sort of dream state, preoccupied with thoughts of “place,” whether that place is the destination they are leaving or the one they are traveling to. I often wonder when I travel, how can I really know a place? So many of my favorite cities become my “favorite” not by some objective idea of what they are, but because of the memories and experiences I made or found there. 

My work “Bay Area Hyper Naturalism” brings the viewer in and out of an encounter with San Francisco—my adopted city for many years. It’s buildings, naturalism, sky- scrapers, and native or common flora are all there—but the city is distorted with artifacts and scraps of an imagined reality. 

Some of the elements are autobiographically mine (the statue Minerva, my eponymous hero), some are iconically of the tourist (the Golden Gate bridge and Transamerica Pyramid building), and some are invented. The viewer peers into this trompe l’oeil, and (I hope) finds a new way to dream of place, city, and destination, as travelers await their flight. 

The project was fabricated by Franz Mayer of Munich, Germany and installed in 2019.