14 September 2025
The video for “We Like to Party” (1998) by Vengaboys...something feral and disorienting about the 136 bpm, relentlessly pumping choreography, direct eye contact with the camera, almost Jodorowskyian shots of them posed around different parts of Spain, and the lyrics—especially in the prechorus: “Happiness is just around the corner.”
12 September 2025
Son shell: Began based on Omeed playing cello at Red Room until the afterimage of Tessa pulling a hermit crab out of clear ocean water in Sag Harbor overlapped it and mixed with contemplation of home, sleep, death, omnipresent technology, rest, and ultimately something that feels maybe aligned with the allegory of the cave in relation to the wisdom accrued from both growing older and remaining steadfast on one's artistic path.
10 September 2025
Keeping acrylic, pencils, and oil on hand during the image-making process of these new works has created a nimble kind of rhythm in which dead ends with one medium turn into fresh starts with another, but it has also got me thinking about material hierarchies. I'm wary of veering too far into formal experimentation for the sake of it, (I'm reminded again of Judd on Joseph Stella over-prioritizing technical experimentation at the expense of ideas), but I do think there is something about the interplay between these materials when permanence is a factor; wax colored pencils and oil don't mix, so there's a finality to the choices made in colored pencil, a commitment to an irreversible decision that is really helping with my intentionality right now. And also seems like it could be somehow wrapped up in what I'm getting at by holding examples of isolation/solitude in the second half of the 20th century with similar material from the first two decades of the 21st.
8 September 2025
Another bit from studio conversation today—on specificity. I personally feel like holding my references looser is making my work ring truer, but Edith's point that one should be careful to not lose specificity when allowing fragmentation to happen is a good one. I think honing in on specific source material that holds a uniquely singular presence is vital to the work—but for me personally I think I have begun to cultivate an absolute trust that my instinctive choices, even during research, are doing some of that filtering toward specificity for me. Even grabbing screenshots from the home movies I mentioned in my last post—the act of doing so was impulsive, unthinking, acted on from a hazy peripheral spark, which feels important to trust.
6 September 2025
Edith asked me in the studio today where my source material has been coming from for this new body of work—I told her about the pre-2000s home videos I've been finding. From 16mm in the 50s to handheld camcorders in the 80s and 90s, I've been focusing on isolated figures engaged, absorbed, occupied in flow. Vermeer. Being drawn to these kinds of scenes and poses isn't new for me, but I've been thinking about the significance in finding them via home videos; with someone behind the camera, there's a communal or social element baked in to the act of capturing someone in their solitude. This feels like a stark contrast with how we have turned the camera on ourselves as the past two decades have unfolded since the first iPhone was released, which in turn has changed our understanding of isolation. Using work as a mirror to reflect this inversion back to viewers to me feels useful and interesting.
4 September 2025
Susan Rothenberg: The Weather at Hauser & Wirth New York. My first time encountering her work in the flesh—these are such slow release paintings. Was especially taken by Dos Equis (acrylic and tempera on canvas, 169.9 x 296.2 x 4.1 cm, 1974), a big white one of two horses overlapping, the whole composition sliced by lines intersecting twice near the canvas's horizontal midline, once near the top middle edge, and once near the bottom middle edge. The effect is kaleidoscopic, almost as if you are watching the forms alternate between embossing and debossing themselves, the mere presence of the intersecting lines recontextualizing/refreshing/re-presenting the angles of the horses as elemental pivot points. There is also the barely perceptible ghost of what perhaps could have been a first go at placing one of the left x's lines hiding underneath the final layer of white, as if innumerable axes form the architecture of the painting and she has chosen to cover all but those that remain. So much done with seemingly so little.
2 September 2025
Image inventory: view of a stained glass altar through a church door on Nantucket, a birdlike shadow falling over a slatted bench, long blue laundry center in Flushing, tug of war with a dog, tiny black voids, orange spray paint on steel coverings, rusted apartment railings, fire escapes into the sky, shadows on and crevices in Manhattan pavement, bright white/chrome/yellow (New York subway), sky striking the horizon light a lightning bolt between buildings, sunlight wrapping around the corner of a Manhattan skyscraper, orange vent with steam, cello and violin screeching into a dark bar filled with people who didn't come to listen, end of a three-pronged Long Island City railing spray painted orange/blue/turquoise/yellow/pink and red.
31 August 2025
Great little essay on the use of language in contemporary painting by Jonathan (Tignor) from the latest entry to his Malerblöd Substack (worth a subscription if you're reading this). Especially the bit where he explains: “Language is hardly stable, but against the backdrop of an abstract painting, there is an illusion of stability.”
He addresses Daisy Parris's painting Portrait of a Poem, pointing out how “the third poetic panel is the most successful to [him] because it operates like the Basquiat above [Untitled (Tar Tar Tar, Lead Lead Lead), 1981]. “Haven’t / Wrote” is barely legible through the blast of paint. It is says more by saying less.”
That immediately made me think of Jasper Johns's Flag (1954-55), which I just saw for the first time at MoMA in New York. It's nearly impossible to find an image online that is high-quality enough to decipher the tiny sentences contained in the bits of its newspaper articles caked in encaustic, but up close in person there were many great little moments that I could imagine must have been quite satisfying for him to recontextualize. Remembering a small section in particular of one of the flag's stripes where most of the newsprint is covered, but the end of a sentence about someone “going into shock” is legible. That to me felt like a nice example of language being used to expand rather than prescribe.
29 August 2025
Another thing Olivia's work prompted me to think about: how Ed Ruscha says he was originally attracted to words because “words have no size.” Wanted to know what she would think of that, and further if she regards words as having weight, because “RHYME” and “BAROQUE” are almost like sandbags in the context of the paintings they appear in in her show. They drive the paintings down to the ground. A good place to mention the 2007 MIT study I recently learned about that concluded that Russians, who have two different words for lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”) were able to discriminate between colors faster than English speakers when tasked with describing blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. In this way, language quite literally is color. Or at least is key in our cultural understanding of it. So perhaps the connoted size and weight of words changes with their cultural context, a potentially interesting idea to sit with further.
27 August 2025
A lot to unpack from seeing Olivia van Kuiken's show (Bastard Rhyme at Matthew Brown) and visiting her studio after. Firstly: her free-standing, double-sided paintings with pictorial images on their front sides greeting the viewer upon walking into the space and monochrome color blocks on their backs that turns the space into a color field installation when the viewer reaches the back of the room. This was effective—the front sides are completed by the viewer, the audience key to their resistance of the extradiegetic gaze (especially the three bust paintings that are on the left side when you walk in, each one averting their eyes from the possibility of that fourth wall fracture in spite of their centered positions). They're human-size and human-like, their figures' momentum often pushing from left to right, trying to escape the edges of their containers to the periphery. But once at the back of the room, their muted monochrome (dyed canvas) backsides create a sense that they've turned away, subservient to the high-hung untitled work that pays homage to the installation of Malevich's 1913 suprematist square in 1915's The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10. At Olivia's studio I told her about someone walking into the show while I was absorbing the color field, and how I immediately hid behind one of the works to avoid them, averting my gaze in the process.