Rachel Zaretsky-Kreiner and I made Ode to Pearl for Life Is With People, a group exhibition at The Beach in Los Angeles, co-curated by Hannah Tishkoff and Sophie Appel, in which 27 artists build a house together. The house is an accumulation of artworks, objects, memories and contributions that consider home as something made through and with other people.

The work is an ode to our daughter, Pearl, who we’re expecting this fall, and a window into our home, past, present and future. We brought together things inherited, found on walks and collected on trips, each carrying memories of family and place. The work reflects on how we mark, spend and value time through acts of searching and gathering.

Seven pieces of stained glass represent the days of the week and how we map out a life together, our routines and rituals. The composition loosely takes the form of a tablescape, reflecting how much of our life with friends and family happens around a table. It’s a record of what we value now and what we hope to bring her into.

I was also asked to design the checklist for the show, a fold-out poster that maps where each artist’s contribution sits in the house. The exhibition text is by Ruby Zuckerman, and moves through ideas of home, memory, family, loss, and the way places and objects accumulate meaning through the people who inhabit them.

On view at The Beach, 763 E. 14th St., Los Angeles, through December 3, 2026, by appointment.

Exhibiting artists included: Sydney Abady, Samar Al Summary, Saif Azzuz, Lulu Thrower, Moya Azzuz, Viola Azzuz, Anna Betbeze, Nao Bustamante, Cameron Cameron, Anais Franco, David Horvitz, DD Herschlein, Maddy Inez, Rachel & Troy Zaretsky-Kreiner, Martin Miller, Randi Malkin Steinberger, Aryana Polat, Jools Rothblatt, Cielo Saucedo, Ethan Shaw, Sam Shoemaker, Shani Strand, Textile Artifacts, Julia Weist, Marley White, Nico B. Young and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.

28 ⅞ × 17 ¾ × ¾ inches | resin, stained glass, floorboards, oxidized pennies, grandmother’s watch, seashells, sea glass, rocks and mirrored plexiglass

Special Thanks to Matt Endler and Bryan Morello of Studio Kluge for fabrication and development, including molding, casting and installation; Hings Lim for early 3D rendering and fabrication assistance; and Jacquie Allison for hand fabricating the seven stained glass pieces from our designs. Thank you to Hannah Tishkoff and Sophie Appel for inviting us to be part of Life Is With People.

Role: Artist & Checklist Designer

Collaborator: Rachel Zaretsky-Kreiner

Location: The Beach, Los Angeles

Year: 2026

I grew up going to Jaxson’s in Dania Beach with my family and grandparents during the holiday season. A hyper-American ritual, the neon lights, the plastic menus, the oversized portions, the feeling that dessert could be an event instead of an afterthought. Jaxson’s had plenty of elaborate sundaes, but there was one we never ordered: The Original Kitchen Sink®. It was treated like a forbidden object. Completely over the top, borderline grotesque, piled with too many scoops of ice cream, too much whipped cream, sparklers, tiny American flags, and the energy of a spectacle. The menu even insists on a minimum of four people and charges twenty-one dollars per person, turning one dessert into a sixty-five-dollar group commitment. Online, there are countless videos of people attempting to eat the whole thing alone as a challenge—an extreme performance of indulgence.

This piece takes that childhood memory and turns it into an object. This piece began with a drawing of Jaxson’s famous kitchen-sink dessert carved directly into corrugated cardboard using a Dremel. I photographed the carving, vectorized it, and had it laser-engraved into a sheet of wood, turning the drawing into a large custom stamp. I rolled black acrylic paint across the wood block and printed it onto kraft paper, then wheat-pasted that print onto a heavier layer of corrugated cardboard. The final step was building a custom copper-pipe frame and mounting the work inside it.

I made this for Super Cooper, a group exhibition curated by Lulu Sanchez at Swampspace in the Miami Design District during Miami Basel. The show brought together Cooper Union alumni with ties to Florida, blending local Miami artists with work mailed in from across the country. The exhibition highlighted how artist-run spaces and educational communities build networks that shape creative futures, especially in places with layered histories like South Florida.

Exhibiting artists included: Daniel Arsham, Brian Booth, Ezekiel Binns, David Brooks, Juan Cardona, Leo Castaneda, Juan José Cielo, Lin Diagonales, Adriana Farmiga, Lino Fernandez, Luis Ignacio Figallo, Noah Garcia, Samantha Grenier, Aramis Gutierrez, Sarah Haley, Christian Hincapie, Javier Hernandez, Paloma Izquierdo, Valerie Kamen, Troy Zaretsky-Kreiner, William Lane, Fharid LaTorre, Lisa Lawley, Vanessa Leiva Santos, Oliver Loaiza, Yuri Masnyj, Marilyn Marcus, Jackson McGrath, Vinicius de Oliveira, Andrea Recalde, Moises Sanabria, Lulu Sanchez, Diego Salazar, Rio Sofia, Maria Jimenez, Em Shoots, J.A. Sprang, Zach Teplin, Juan Valadez, Jovan Karlo Villalba, Daniel Young, Camila Villa Zertuche.

23 ¾ × 16⅛ inches | black acrylic paint, brown kraft paper, wheatpaste, ½ inch domestic-grade M copper piping, ½ inch copper short elbows, Safe Flo® lead-free solder, machine screws

Special Thanks to Brian Broker for his help.

Role: Artist

Location: Miami & Brooklyn

Year: 2025

This piece was made from two vertical strips of pickled and oiled steel, welded together in a way that lets the object feel both industrial and handmade. I welded the word BIG above the outline of an apple, pulling from the classic nickname for New York City. The welds are intentionally uneven, almost cartoonish, giving the steel a loose, gestural quality that contrasts against the hardness of the material.

Placed side by side, the two steel plates also form an abstract echo of the World Trade Center towers. They create a quiet architectural reference, not literal but present enough to suggest the shape of a memory that still sits in the background of growing up in New York.

I made this sculpture in a friend’s shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The process was direct—cutting and welding—and the final object keeps every scorch, bead, and imperfection. It’s part tribute part emotional shorthand for a place that is both monumental and personal.

6" x 10" x 2" rolled pickled and oiled steel

Special Thanks to Brian Broker for his help.

Role: Artist

Location: Red Hook, Brooklyn

Year: 2022

Shameless Enterprise is an ongoing collaborative project between Troy Kreiner and Brian Broker (NYC). Together, they create and sell limited edition ‘novelty’ products centered on the idea and the elicitation of shamelessness. The resulting products fit no particular format and the editions are free to take on multiple forms. At times this means collaborating with other artists and designers. Currently, Shameless Enterprise’s projects are distributed online as well as at the New Museum Gift Shop (NYC).

Role: Co-Founder & Designer

Location: Los Angeles & New York

Year: 2013–Present

L. A. should die vor Glück, a group exhibition organized by Jagoda Bednarsky and Felix Kultau (Just Married). A Levitation Spell took an unfinished sculpture that was originally conceived to defy the weight of its own materiality and appear lifted off the ground. However, in its unfinished state the sculpture would sometimes lose its gravity defying suspension and fall to the ground. With each fall the sculpture would break losing bits and pieces of its marble. In an effort to bestow it with new life, but maintain its identity as a work broken by its own inception, it was resurfaced to a shine and adorned with script bearing a levitation spell. With the spell in place, the sculpture no longer falls, or breaks.

Visit the ongoing project, Just Married here.

View press about the group show on Fluxo.

Role: Artist

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Year: 2017

New Monuments of Chania (2013) is a site-specific performance piece that took place in Chania, Crete, Greece. Born out of participation in the KAM Workshops: New Monuments, the project began as a series of digital photographs capturing the actions of locals around the waterfront of Chania. Known for its ancient ruins Chania is a tourist destination that is enveloped by a sprawling, dense market where locals sell memorabilia of the surrounding crumbling monuments. Inspired by the haphazard nature of the market and its opportunistic response to tourism, the project sought to highlight the vendors and esteem them to the same cultural significance of the memorabilia they were peddling.

Suggesting that they are as much the monument as the ruins themselves, a “New Monument”, the performance involved selling the framed photographs to tourists within the economy of the market itself. Without selling any photographs, the frames where returned to the sites where the images were captured with the hopes that the subject would find and appreciate my memorabilia of the true monument, the living monument.

Role: Artist

Location: Chania, Crete, Greece

Year: 2013

Made in the fall of 2014, at a residency program at a remote chalet in the Rhone Alps. The initial conception was to utilize haystacks to create a self-referential portrait of place, but after learning that haystacks were too valuable to the farmers to be sold, an analog was created out of readily available material intrinsic to the landscape. As a result, the form of the haystacks where constructed with firewood, a material as ubiquitous though less precious.

Purposed to be used and experienced by the community living in the nearby small village, ‘When Haystacks Travel’ sought to introduce an alternative perspective onto a known landscape using the familiar material language of a commonplace object. In effect, the object asks people to reimagine the thing to which it refers — a haystack — and by relation the natural landscape to which often it belongs.

Role: Artist in Residence

Location: Rhône-Alpes, Châtel, France

Collaborators: Robert Bezrutcyzk & Ellen Herra

Year: 2014

Co-founded by Troy Curtis Kreiner, Rachel Mendelsohn, and Sebastian Zimmerhackl, NEO is a decentralized collective of artists and critical thinkers from all around the world. Everyone gathers for one week, in one city and rallies behind free and creative education.

NEO workshops aim to blur the boundaries between art and critical thinking. Each NEO event is interdisciplinary with an emphasis on design-thinking, inclusive of a multitude of media, including but not limited to: writing, sculpture, graphic design, performance art, engineering, sociology, drawing, printmaking and more.

The core of a NEO workshop event is comprised of 3-5 unique groups made up of 6-8 participants. Workshops are lead by practitioners from the city the event takes place, hand selected by the NEO organizers.

See documentation from NEO New York: Visual Thinking

Role: Director and Co-founder

Creative Partners: Rachel Mendelsohn, Sebastian Zimmerhackl, Pablo Chea, Olivia Glennon

Venue: Cooper Union, NYC

Year: 2013–2015

Do Good Green-Wood (2013) was a solo exhibition at the Cooper Union showcasing Troy’s volunteer research at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY. Captivated by the material and historical culture of the sight, Troy both borrowed and created artwork around the legacy of some individuals who were interred.

An archive of the skeleton keys from the mausoleums were taken out on loan. Troy displayed them alongside a grouping of artifacts that the artist mined from the cemetery’s permanent collection as well as artworks he made in reference to the time spent at Green-Wood. In addition, a custom display typeface was designed in reference to the handwriting found on the architectural blueprints of the mausoleums under the guidance of Alexander Tochilovsky.

More about the project here.

Role: Archivist, Curator, Artist

Venue: Cooper Union, NYC

Year: 2013