Big Sausage Pizza, 2008

(Stainless steel)

16 x 16 x 21 in
40.6 x 40.6 x 53.3 cm
Artist Proof Edition with foundry mark stamped on bottom

Exhibited during : at October 10th, .

Have you ever had pizza? Now you can.

You might be surprised how much Big Sausage Pizza has to say, and that's just how wants it.

The piece was born in , just as the was beginning to explode out of the digital back rooms and onto the world stage under the watchful eyes of , , , , , , and other popular platforms. But Big Sausage Pizza was conceived well before that, in the of the internet when few truly public forums existed and media of every kind was most commonly shared via .

In those days one never knew what to expect from a or an and each had equal odds of either brightening your day with a or to your , your dignity, or your relationships... and that was half the fun. Every recipient of these , , or suddenly had the means not only to pass them along to as many people as they pleased, but to them before sending them on. In this way, the media very quickly mutated and were around the globe. In other words, they became true .

has evolved in much the same way. Like the , it started as an , but today both are so common throughout the world that most of us can barely remember a time when they were special and exotic. Just as the internet simply IS, pizza also simply IS. We used to , or at least buy it in a place where they were handmade and offered a . Today, the meme that is pizza is brought to our tables by an almost entirely , and it's so wildly mutated that each individual has the ability to create a new twist on the old design, and all from the .

has combined these two seemingly disparate concepts into one: Big Sausage Pizza. Made from , the piece shines like a naïve, concept of the future. But because it's, the internal surface is rough and irregular and its reflections are unintelligible bits of light. Just as subverted traditional social interactions, and as the modern pizza industry has subverted its own origins, subverts our expectations. He offers a for our jaded minds: a pizza that — like the internet — reflects our own faces back to us, but only after they've been by the very that they seek to view. 

When asked about his inspirations for Big Sausage Pizza, the artist points first to his early experiences with technology. His first office was in an old computer room from the . It was special because it was the only room in its building, a circumstance not intended for human comfort but as for the of the day. His job revolved around and , and during this period the industry was transitioning from fully to . "I was seeing how computers not only needed their own spaces and environments, but were also becoming part of the creative world," explains. "It was like something out of : We created , but now is turning around and ." These realizations led him to his own physical realization of ideas from .

He goes on to describe how this all came together in the "" that in the early : the launch and explosion of sites like , , , , , , , and , along with their inherent problems; the meteoric rise and tragic fall of and other ; the launch of and other services that for the ; the advent of fully realistic computer-generated imagery and in films (as well as the availability of software for amateur enthusiasts to create ); and much more. In short, the world was a very different place in 2007 from the world we had known before. "I wanted to show how Americana had been , how had come with a '', a kind of for the."

In Big Sausage Pizza, presents a vision of modern of media and as a reflection of the world that is "". He found that his own was freely available online via a quick Google search despite the fact that he had never purposely put it there. He soon realized that the same was true for celebrities like , whose life was so that it became not just one but a , and virtually every other person who has ever .

Finally, the artist also took inspiration from the work of . All of Koons' — including the — are in stainless steel, a hard-working, everyday material that gives a false impression of opulence due to its enduring . At the same time, it takes a step in the opposite direction from Koons' work, incorporating a real-world object and its inherent rather than presenting a , of it. All of this, then, provides beneath the initial, outward appearance.

invites you to bring your own experience to Big Sausage Pizza and find out what it back to you. You might just be surprised.