I founded hybrid, a design and art gallery in San Diego in 2001. The gallery functioned as a platform for public discourse, and brought together artists and designers to work on public interest projects. Most projects were collaborative and interdisciplinary:

 

Inventing Agriculture was a group exhibition that began with a designer’s problem statement: the marks we make on the land emerge from the tools at our disposal – if we want to make new marks that portend an alternative future, we will need new tools. Projects included a “Crack Garden” with Alyssum seeds sown in sidewalk cracks (Anne Mudge and Diane Gage), a “Plow” of Agave stalks, chains and a harness that was dragged across an old landfill in Balboa Park (Melissa Smedley), and “Tilling the Genome”, a critique of biotechnology in our food supply that was constructed with Cheetos (hot and regular) and rubber fish (Tershia d’Elgin).

 

Building ID was undertaken prior to the planned renovation of the building. It imagined the story of the building, from its inception and its materials (and the previous life of materials) to its destruction and remaking. The installation consisted of a video projection on the building façade and a slide projection that moved through the building’s landscape of materials.

 

Three Rivers: The Low Ground and Krimpernerwaard emerged from a week-long design charrette at the gallery with ecological artists Helen and Newton Harrison and a group of landscape architects, architects and artists from the US and The Netherlands. The exhibition at hybrid was later shown at Kasteel Groenveld in Baarn, The Netherlands.