A system based on the angle of the sunset and sunrise on the summer and winter Solstice, used to levitate a rock.

"Six Miles of Twine: Las Vegas Piece"

This work is inspired by Water Di Maria's "Las Vegas Piece".

When Walter DiMaria was interviewed about "Las Vegas Piece" he talked about the difficulty in documenting the piece, and how a photograph doesn't really work because to really experience the piece you needed to spend the time to drive all the way out on a dirt road, then walk out into the desert, and spend time walking the length of the piece. He figured it would take a person about four hours to actually experience the piece. That resonated with me as someone whose work is based in process and labor because it spoke of the visceral experience of creating the work rather than what it looked like. I decided I would use his four hour time frame as a guide to create my reaction based piece. For four straight days, I left Las Vegas at 4am, to drive out to a remote location before the sunrise, and spend four hours experiencing a space. Each of the four days I made a walking drawing by using six miles of twine to draw out a diagram within the space. On the final day I recorded my drawing and edited the performance into a 24minute video.

On Rt.50 in Western Nevada there is a stretch of road where people stop to write their names, or initials, or short messages by arranging rocks to spell things out.

I’ve passed through there a few times on road trips and thought that something more interesting could be written, and when I researched the road I found it was the first coast-to-coast road in America connecting Ocean City, MD all the way to the San Francisco, CA.

I decided to write the Preamble to the Constitution so people could read it as they drove by.

It took 5 days of arranging rocks, and it’s about a half mile long, composed of 276, four foot high letters made of rocks found on site.

The Bonneville Salt Flats in Western Utah contain 50 square miles of open space, with a layer of crusty salt across the surface. I broke through the crust of salt with a hand-held garden tiller to draw diagrams based on Euclidian Geometry.

In the 1920’s, the United States Department of Commerce and the Air Traffic Control Association produced the world's first ground-based civilian navigation system: a series of lighted beacons and concrete arrows that would extend from New York to San Francisco. Every 25 miles, pilots would pass a 70-foot concrete arrow on the ground which was painted orange. 

In the unused land in Nevada and Utah some of those arrows still sit out in the wide open landscape with the paint, weathered and peeled off.  

I tracked down 12 of those arrows, and repainted them.  

In the wide open spaces of the desert, it's hard to ignore the context of the space you're in.  You are enveloped by the vast distances, the heat, and the silence.  To obscure myself from that context, I dug holes big enough to lie down in to obscure the sights and sound of the desert.  Then I filled them back in.  

In June of 2017, writer Jeff Himmelman and I hiked around the Washington DC Beltway.  You can read about it here.

This is a video line drawing, recording the horizon across the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Homicide Projectors are a series of low-tech projector boxes that create a shadow the shape of Washington DC projected on the wall with the locations of the homicides from each year (2014 - present) cut out.  

The US/Canadian Border is the longest country to country border in the world.  I followed that border from Maine to Washington, going through all 101 border crossings, in and out in a sewing motion, while staying on public roads as close to the border as possible.  It took 17 days of driving.  

The result is a 4 hour video showing the process of driving up to each border, and a 25foot long map showing the entire border and my route represented with yarn on top of a printed map.  

On November 30, 2010, the Smithsonian removed a video by gat artist David Wojnarowicz from the National Portrait Gallery, caving in to the pressure from anti-gay groups and threats of budget “scrutiny” by incoming House Speaker John Boehner.

We believe that Americans should be free to form their own opinions about art - and everything else - without the “help” of politicians or pressure groups.

On December 4th, 2010, we brought the censored art back into the museum so people could make up their own minds about it. The result was being handcuffed, and a lifetime ban from all Smithsonian Institutions for life.

One month later, we secured permits, and a shipping container to legally place the “Museum of Censored Art” right in front of the National Portrait Gallery to give the public the opportunity to make up their own minds about the censored video.

In six weeks nearly six thousand people came to see the video.

The initial protest, and the execution of the Museum of Censored Art was a collaborative effort of Michael Blasenstien and Michael Dax Iacovone.

I spent a month driving from Washington DC to Alaska and back.  Each of these photos represents the process of driving through an entire state. 

These photos represent the process of walking through public space in Washington DC.  Each one is composed inside the camera, by manipulating the film into overlapping the images.  

Make Art With Mike is about re-exploring public space that you're already familiar with.

Bosnian Mapping Projects were created in collaboration with Bosnian Artists. 

The FreeSpace Collective was founded by artists Billy Friebele and Michael Dax Iacovone who began working together on collaborative video projects in graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art 2008.  FreeSpace Collective focuses on community engagement, public spaces, mapping, and interactivity with an emphasis on collaboration. They have exhibited in Detroit, MI; St. Louis, MO; Washington, DC; Baltimore, MD;  Sarajevo, Bosnia; and Jatiwangi, Indonesia among other places. FreeSpace Collective is based in Washington, DC.