Styrology
PHP: Let’s talk about your research with Styrofoam, or Styrology as you coined it. You started collecting Styrofoam 10 years ago?
RS: The first one was probably in 2000, so eight years ago.
PHP: And you sat with the pieces for many years before creating your current body of work. Now you have this rich portfolio of a broad range of work that includes hand-made miniature replicas, modular paintings, cast bronze and porcelain pieces, photos, videos and installation pieces. Many artists if they had an idea that they contemplated year after year might lose steam and move on to something else. But it seems like that’s an essential part of your process. What kept the energy of the whole process going for you?
RS: I impose discipline on myself to actually follow one subject, which over the past eight years has been the Styrofoam. I originally started with the Styrofoam because I was working with Nam June Paik and at the time didn’t really have a body of my own besides an ongoing notebook of videos that I was taking of industrial sites as we were traveling through different countries.
Along that route, I was contemplating what I’d be doing at the end of the whole Nam June Paik tour, and one day I picked up a piece of Styrofoam that I thought was interesting. I stuck it to my board in Nam June’s studio above where I was doing all the administrative and sculptural work and just looked at it. I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was fascinating. Then I decided okay, that’s going to be your point of departure. But you’re going to be very disciplined about it, and you’re not going to let yourself wander off into other subjects or other forms. You’re going to keep it really simple. You’re going to use photography and these shapes, and you’re going to think about what you can do with this. That’s going to be your alphabet, your research.
I’ve worked with so many different types of media—photography, painting, sculpture, set design—that I felt like if I just let loose and did whatever was at the tips of my fingers it would be random and I needed some kind of structure. So why not start with that? It was simple. It was minimal. It was also evocative of a lot of my childhood and family history, and so it made a lot of sense as a departure point.
PHP: Your shows so far have referenced cities. And they do look like miniature, lost cities. How specific is that connection between the actual objects in the installation and archaeology and architecture?
RS: Originally, my interest in Styrofoam was because it escaped identification, that it was something that was meant for a specific use within our society but when taken away from that function and thrown out into the street was immediately bereft of any purpose. If you looked at it from a creative angle it could have infinite meanings and multiple scales. So originally my research was not so much about representing cities or representing architecture but about representing the infinite possibilities of these shapes. They could go from the monumental to the microscopic, from the sculptural to the architectural to the abstract. I was really exploring all those different dimensions. 
Somewhere along the way a city came up as a reference from other people who saw the work, and the title Sunken City, which Marc de Puechredon came up with—and I thought to myself, “well that really identifies it and closes off the research for something very finite and specific.” But once again, to be true to my process I decided to let his perception influence the process.
