Hereâs a version that keeps your structure but lets it slip its leash a bitâmore velocity, more heat, without losing the intelligence underneath:
⸝
Thereâs 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 pieceâfinished, named, pinned to the wall like a specimen this weekâdidnât begin with a subject. Subjects are too obedient.
It began with a rule: build depth that isnât 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 âpainting,â âhistory,â âvalue,â all the usual passwords to get past the guards.
But the frame isnât neutralâitâs 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 upâdomestic, slightly warped, catching light like unreliable witnesses. Circles drift through the fieldâlenses, portals, surveillance devices, who knowsâtrying 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.
Whatâs 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 wonât stay still
The materials remember where they came from. You canât 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 donât dissolve into compositionâthey argue. They stall. They push back.
So the work isnât composed so much as brokered.
Each element makes a demand: look here, move this way, recognize me, donât 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 oilâinstant, frictionless, already resolved before youâve 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 doesnât arrive. It builds. Or it doesnât.
Thatâs 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.
Another refusal to flatten out.














