Work, Images, and Notes

Here’s a version that keeps your structure but lets it slip its leash a bit—more velocity, more heat, without losing the intelligence underneath:

⸻

There’s a problem that keeps pacing the studio at night, knocking things over, refusing to sit:

how to make an image that can hold contradiction without immediately trying to clean it up, file it down, turn it into something polite.

This piece—finished, named, pinned to the wall like a specimen this week—didn’t begin with a subject. Subjects are too obedient.

It began with a rule: build depth that isn’t fake. No painted illusion, no Renaissance window. Actual depth. Layers you could pry apart with a knife. Time not depicted but trapped in the glue, in the seams, in the slight misalignment where something resisted being placed.

At first glance, it behaves. A frame. Ornate, a little too ornate. Gold-tongued, whispering “painting,” “history,” “value,” all the usual passwords to get past the guards.

But the frame isn’t neutral—it’s a decoy, a salesman, a liar with good manners. It tells you how to look. Inside, the work quietly refuses to comply.

Printed fragments. Reflective scraps. Adhesive scars that never quite disappear. Small objects clinging on like barnacles.

Spoons keep showing up—domestic, slightly warped, catching light like unreliable witnesses. Circles drift through the field—lenses, portals, surveillance devices, who knows—trying to stabilize the image and failing, beautifully.

Some passages pretend to be architecture. Others give up and collapse into rubble.

Nothing lies flat. Even the image has weight, has edges, has a body that interrupts you.

What’s really happening is a turf war between systems:

order trying to impose itself on accumulation

refinement getting dragged down into excess

the domestic leaking into abstraction

the historical frame pressing its face against a surface that won’t stay still

The materials remember where they came from. You can’t launder that out.

Commercial print still hums with its original purpose. Ornament still wants to decorate something obedient. Utility objects still carry the ghost of use.

They don’t dissolve into composition—they argue. They stall. They push back.

So the work isn’t composed so much as brokered.

Each element makes a demand: look here, move this way, recognize me, don’t erase me.

The process becomes a long negotiation, sometimes a standoff, sometimes a fragile truce, until something emerges that feels less like a decision and more like a necessity.

And underneath all that: attention. Or the lack of it.

We live in a flood of images that slide past the eye like oil—instant, frictionless, already resolved before you’ve even registered them.

This thing resists that. It slows you down. Forces your body into it. You have to shift, catch the light, track what sits in front of what, realize you missed something, go back.

Meaning doesn’t arrive. It builds. Or it doesn’t.

That’s where mixed media stops being a style and starts being a method of thinking.

Not a collage of materials, but a collision of logics.

An image that behaves less like a picture and more like a place you have to move through.

This piece is another small escalation.

Tempting Temporality

2008

the image doesn’t hold still

it slips—

between a hand and a fruit

between a body and its echo

between something sacred and something already discarded

everything is mid-collapse

or mid-becoming

(which is the same thing, just named differently)

there are too many images here

they press against each other

like voices in a room where no one agrees on the language

a girl turns

a heart burns

a machine remembers something it was never meant to keep

paint drips like time refusing to behave

like gravity trying to write a sentence

you think you recognize something—

but it’s already been covered

cut

replaced

forgotten under another layer

desire lives here

but it doesn’t land anywhere

it just keeps moving

attaching itself to surfaces

then abandoning them

this was before I knew what I was doing

which is to say

this was when I was closest

nothing resolves

nothing needs to

the image wants to disappear

and takes its time doing it

—

Children are not confused by complexity. They are confused by condescension.

After years of making public art for schools, I’ve learned that young people respond most strongly to work that trusts their intelligence—work that invites curiosity rather than simplifying the world for them.