The River Unit series reflects upon our utilization, manipulation, and unitization of elemental materials and natural phenomenon, such as carbon or our waterways, through very sophisticated technologies and the physical labor of generations of the areas various populations. Marking, pressing and rubbing large sheets of pure compressed graphite (a form of highly compressed coal - or carbon - used for electrical conduction) with pigments and carbon, these works consider the origin of materials, thought, and gesture in the regional creation of heavy technology, urban terrain, and the appropriation of our local resources to uses both specific and limitlessly meaningful.

River Unit III: Lots with Porcelain Playthings is the summation of the series, inspired by archaeological studies (results of which are currently housed at the Fairmont downtown) conducted along the banks of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. Thought to be previously resided first civically by those manning forts on the Point, to later populations relegated to Pittsburgh's slums, and finally the heavy weaving of innumerable railroad lines and industrial waste deposits, evidence has been found that centuries ago, many of Pittsburgh’s working class and middle class families with a variety of nationalities made their homes along the riverbanks instead of up the hillsides. These people were the same people that supported the regions industrial growth and routinely altered our river banks to ease navigation and commerce and to allow neighborhood and urban development to take place at the feet of our hilly terrain. Centuries of flooding, altered waterways and urban reconstruction buried, then unearthed, then buried again, wells of evidence of the tandem gestures and materials of the societies that had formed here and the natural phenomenon with which we work.