In religious painting, light often comes from a divine or symbolic source. By placing light behind the viewer and projecting their shadow forward, the painting reverses that hierarchy. The viewer becomes the source of light, or at least the obstruction of it—suggesting guilt, complicity, or authorship of what is unfolding.
This presents a core critique: that belief systems are not external impositions but internalized architectures, and that the viewer is already an actor within them, not a neutral observer.
10.02.25
The Adidas tracksuit is deeply embedded in global visual culture as shorthand for masculine threat, peripheral violence, and class-coded delinquency. In Hollywood, it signals thug, hitman, or enforcer—a uniform of expendable menace. The clothing implies role, not individuality.
Its visual omnipresence—especially in cinema, meme culture, and surveillance footage—turns the Adidas tracksuit into a mythic garment, one whose meaning has become post-functional. The stripes do the semiotic work. Viewers know the code before they name it. They operate pre-linguistically as threat, authority, or social deviance—tapping into image-memory formed through decades of cinematic and media exposure.
09.29.25
I’ve been looking at a lot of early Medieval paintings lately—particularly Western European religious iconography produced before the advent of linear perspective. They seem pertinent to the times we’re living in. These works, often hierarchical in composition and saturated with symbolic content, were designed not to depict reality, but to structure spiritual perception. They visualized the unseen systems of order (cosmic, theological, moral) that governed medieval life.
My next body of work will borrow compositional grammar and metaphysical intensity from these works, recontextualizing it within the material and ideological structures of contemporary culture.
It seems to me we have an emergence of a new medieval condition within modern society. As institutions destabilize and global systems become more opaque, belief has not dissolved, it has reconfigured. We are living through the return of rigid ideologies, absolutist identities, algorithmic authority, and digitally mediated faiths. Consumerism itself has long been a theological system, with products, brands, and curated spaces acting as modern icons—objects of ritualized attention and emotional investment. I’m interested in making paintings that adapt the visual logic of religious art to interrogate how objects now function as containers of secular devotion, social myth, and manufactured transcendence.
07.18.25
I’ve always been drawn to the quiet power of the objects we keep—and perhaps even more so, to the ones we let go. The act of discarding things tells a story. In the digital marketplaces and auction sites where I sourced the objects for Orion’s Belt, each listing becomes a kind of accidental portrait. A seller’s choices—what they list, how they photograph it, what it’s grouped with, how much it’s worth to them—reveal traces of who they are. These artifacts, sold in lots or as single curiosities, are discovered rather than arranged, often depicted with the casual aesthetic choices of the original seller intact.
There’s something both intimate and strange about encountering someone’s life in fragments—a charm bracelet, a ceramic figurine lit with oddly romantic diffused lighting, a pair of gloves described simply as “worn.” You begin to sense the outline of a person through the scattered evidence of what they’ve cast off. By preserving the way these objects were presented, I’m not just documenting the items themselves, but the moment of their transition—between ownership and mythology, between one life and the next.
The title, Orion’s Belt, refers to the constellation of stars that form the belt around the waist of the hunter in the night sky: held together by invisible logic. Like those stars, the objects we leave behind become points in a larger shape—unintentional groupings that hint at identity, desire, loss, and the silent logics of value.
This ongoing work operates as a kind of digital archaeology—an observational practice focused on discovery and how objects live on after we’re done with them. Rather than manipulating or reinterpreting them, I aim to preserve their found context, capturing the small, unguarded ways people reveal themselves through what they discard. In doing so, these works invite reflection not just on the objects themselves, but on the quiet systems through which meaning accumulates, shifts, and disappears.
06.07.25
I’ll admit Nietzsche is a fairly sophomoric entry level philosopher, especially amongst young men, and so I recognize full well a degree of eye-rolling is to be expected in referencing his work, but nonetheless I’ve been fascinated by his concept of Eternal Recurrence lately. That every moment of one's life, from the greatest joys to the deepest pains, will repeat infinitely in the same sequence, forever. My work lately has been probing at a this question: if every moment were to repeat infinitely, would we embrace it or recoil?
Visual repetition and symmetry are of great interest to me, not as structures of order but as fragile illusions—poised on the verge of collapse. I’m thinking about figures that hesitate, reflections that waver, and shadows that shift with a will of their own, mirroring the mind’s struggle to grasp a world that never settles; a world that stutters forward as it circles back. The past folds into the present, and the line between what was, what is, and what will be begins to blur. Reality flickers, uncertainty takes form, and to exist is to teeter on the edge of recurrence—forever returning, forever slightly askew.