Santa Barbara’s Department for Applied Geography. On view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara from July 6 – July 17, 2022.

Through a multimedia reimagining of my bicycle experience within Southern California, I have become interested in creating artworks that reflect and promote the bicycle as an avatar for art and life. In addition, the bicycle also serves as a necessary utility within an ideological framework that challenges car-centric assumptions within urban and suburban settings.

This experience and framework are what I refer to as the Department Of Applied Geography (DOAG) – a broader project that understands what I create as a response to research about the historical and spiritual implications of natural and man-made landscapes in Southern California.

Within these works and exhibition, DOAG provides the opportunity to explore the bicycle as I see it – a life art practice. The bicycle, its components, and its maintenance provide a low-cost opportunity for me to meditate through tinkering as well as explore repair as a radical act of autonomy. DOAG further understands that experience between the human and their bicycle as meditative and a methodology for individual liberation.

I possess both an avocational and professional relationship with the bicycle. As a result, I often find ideas for my creations through knowledge acquired from the kinetic joy provided through trial and error.

Antithetical to most of Southern California and the vast majority of the United States, the city of Santa Barbara California is somewhat of a cycling mecca. Not so much for cycling infrastructure but for the various people, terrains, and neighborhoods that have forged cycling alliances, groups, gatherings, and history.

This collection of video work, photography, literature, and sculpture as well as the broader scope of DOAG is a result of my participation in Santa Barbara’s natural ecology, bicycles, and people. The exhibition is about bikes but not about bikes.

Camino Cielo Bench – Included within my installation is the Camino Cielo Bench. The bench encouraged visitors to interact with the installation to fix or repair their own bicycle. Visitors are welcome to use all the tools provided. Should one need assistance, or have bicycle-related questions, support is available from the Associated Students Bicycle Shop located in the middle of the UCSB campus. Through the use of a QR code visitors would be directly connected to a professional bicycle mechanic at the AS Bike Shop.

Additionally, stripped bicycles and their parts were supplied with the Camino Cielo Bench. This provision was provided to engage and encourage visitors, who did not arrive with a bicycle to assemble or repair. When / if one of these bicycles were reassembled, that bicycle was free for that person to take and ride away with.