Hailing from rural Pennsylvania to attend graduate school in Philadelphia, Ethan Storms’ work has evolved during his time in the city to come to terms with the identity of the two spaces that he finds himself in.

Using chainsaw carving and its history of representation reflecting the values of its community utilizing themes like nationalism and domain, Storms asks in what way does the conflation of those themes within these objects change the cultural meaning of the medium or technique once removed from its attachment to those rural values?

The video and assemblage work then interrupts this general transplantation of a medium to divide the viewers vision that is fractured by window frames, mirrors, and plastic fencing while simultaneously considering ideas of surveillance and repetition. These projections portray movement through transit, forcing a flashing and nervous pace, that contrasts the stillness of his sculptures. Ultimately, all becoming an amalgamation of his experience.

The work operates as a means of critiquing these imagined and real sites, while validating Storms’ part within them. Through this push and pull, he evaluates himself to understand and confront his role within these systems. These problematics can include national pride shifting into a toxic masculinity in the rural sense, or the classist forms within hostile architecture in the urban sense.

However, the work looks to gravitate towards the grey area between these binaries of known/unknown, rural/urban, and nostalgia/critique in an attempt to complicate and genuinely understand the reality of this in-between space.