By day, he works at Waggonner & Ball Architecture/Environment on buildings and innovative urban design projects focused on water management and adaptations to climate change.. By night, he draws, makes prints, and is a co-conspirator with Andy Sternad in Shallow Studio, an art and architecture practice that works to uncover hidden stories in strange sites through interactive installations.
In 2018, John will be an Artist-in-Residence at A Studio In The Woods, a program of Tulane University’s Center for Bioenvironmental Research.
Shallow Studio is an ongoing collaboration with Andrew Sternad.
We work together to uncover hidden stories in strange sites through interactive installations. Our collaboration began as an artistic investigation of Louisiana’s water landscape in parallel to our professional work on urban water projects with Waggonner & Ball Architects in New Orleans. In each project, we seek to plumb the depths of place to find elusive but fundamental phenomena. We have transposed the unstable ground of Louisiana’s swamps to an art gallery’s floor, coaxed life from string and floorboards to reveal a building’s forgotten past, and filled a train station with a symphony composed of water sounds.
In April of 2012, Shallow Studio was honored with a Young Alumni Award for Distinction from Washington University. Usually reserved for a single designer, we consider the award as much a recognition of our collaborative design process as of our work itself.