On a chance meeting in early fall, I sat down at a picnic table in Tivoli, New York and started a conversation with a fellow named Steven and his wife, Alice. I have been intrigued recently with finding out “who are the strangers I pass by in public?”

We engaged in a brief conversation, enough for me to learn about his career in the arts, his interest in the environment and in “deep time.” I left with his calling card which included a towering public sculpture built out of paper in the woods. I happened upon the card two days later and emailed Steven to invite myself to his studio to see his work.  I mentioned to him that I recently embarked upon a project, Eye of the Whirlwind, in which I task myself almost weekly with producing a video piece on the subject of people, places or beyond.

Over the last several years, my interests in finding deeper meaning in human beliefs, behavior and artifacts, as well as the nature of life on earth, prompted my interests in people who seem to share the same curiosity.

I visited him several days later and spent time looking at his work and he sharing vignettes of his career in the arts. During our first meeting, Steven piqued my interest enough that I proposed he become a short film in the Eye of the Whirlwind.  I could make no promises and had no intention of developing a script for the project.  He, not knowing who I really am, agreed to participate. I made two visits to his place to videotape his studio, photograph some of the work and surroundings and record our conversations. I collected the raw recordings for the project, much like his process of collecting raw materials.

I connected with the concepts that inspired his sculptural assemblages of recycled products, photographs and painted materials. His stories reflected a keen interest in large scale work and a fascination with geological time. I saw his work in a larger context of earth, evolution and human time and deep time. He asked open and honest questioning of who are we? What is our purpose here? What does “all of this mean?”  His early work that strove to build big with recycled and biodegradable materials, many with a limited lifespan on earth, appealed to me immediately.  His attraction to the deep strata below the surface of the earth and exposed in highway passages is evidence of the age of the earth that is humbling to the life span of a human.  A strata or layering that finds its way into much of his work, both visually and dimensionally off the wall.

Prominently displayed on the wall of his studio are 15 removable panels call Fragments: an ongoing work of individual assemblages that represent a complex and highly random configuration of shapes. While each shape is done individually, it is a part of a continuously growing piece that fits side by side with other pieces. The criteria of making art in pieces begs the question, “is it every done.”  It keeps going on and on…until you pause it. In fragments on the wall or in an unlimited series of squares, like No Wall. As an extension of the work, the crates in my mind become part of the piece:  a way to store and preserve it.

Above Fragments is a long frieze inspired by a trip to Iceland. (Steven career took him to places around the world to do installations.) Attempting to understand his work challenged me to think differently about my own ideas and assumptions, to consider a more random editing of images, manipulating and layering content visually and audibly.  In short, a shift in perspective of the artifacts we make or collect to express how we process and make sense (or not) of the world. Biography is what he refers to as his Opus which is made of cardboard, pieces of computer boards, paper, pipe cleaners, pressers, tar paper, and yarn. He began the piece in 2008 and “paused” it in 2013.  Biography grew to over 155’ long and expressed a rich texture of found objects that suggest both a personal timeline and a metamorphosis on an evolutionary scale.

As my video project unfolded (both during the videotaping and later in editing) multiple themes began to emerge: Larger than life and impermanent, using recycled and waste materials for the creation of public art. Reassembling fragments of shapes like fragments of memory to record the passing of time and the multiple scenes of creativity.

During our first meeting, he told me the story of his fixed blade knife that remains in his tool kit after more than 50 years. This knife dates back to his early years in construction and even appears in photographs as a kind of tribute to his career of cutting and making things. (The use of the knife in his work and my use of editing tools did not go unnoticed: he separating and rearranging whole images in space and me in moments in time.) At one point in our conversation, a thought occurred to me: we store images and words as fragments in our own brain and then rearranging them to make sense of what we experience. Language is this. This prompted a thought that creativity may be an ongoing process of exercising our control over the chance and random events that shape our identity. The social aspect of sharing ideas and common artifacts and language may be the glue that holds us together as a social order. Maybe Steven’s work is visual gymnastics to stretch the perceptions of the viewer and to create an aesthetic that resonates deep within the body of the viewer.

In the end, what I found rewarding is to be in Steven’s presence as he shares his insights, his obsessions, stories of his work and personal memories of growing up and discovering his insatiable need to make things: furniture, houses, art, whatever. Inside his unpretentious (yet magical) metal building resides an artist who is compelled to express himself through his hands by making and manipulating materials, while at the same time he is truly perplexed by what will he do with it. The question becomes more significant as he ages and looks back at the vast volume of stuff he produced.

November 18, 2025