its morning — four panels, 50 × 115 in. ea. — ink & paint on paper.
"Do you believe it's morning?" is a question about reality, about whether the person asking trusts their own perception. "That's the last thing on my mind" is a refusal to answer, which is its own kind of answer. I was interested in that gap between what gets asked and what gets said back — and how that gap is where most of human relationship actually lives.
The figures — female, male, overlapping, in persistent profile — never address the viewer. Their gazes are internal or lateral, caught in awareness of others without the acknowledgment of them. This is the phenomenology of the crowd, of proximity without intimacy, rendered at a scale that implicates the viewer in the same condition. You stand before it the way you stand in a room full of people you are not quite part of.
The four panels let me work serially across nearly 16 feet, so the figures accumulate the way a conversation does — you think you're seeing the same exchange and then you realize the cast keeps shifting, the intimacy keeps reconfiguring. The gold is the pressure of something outside the frame — light, time, the sacred — pushing into what is otherwise a very contemporary kind of disconnection. I wanted the figures to feel both ancient and completely of this moment. Byzantine flatness, Japanese screen painting, the gold ground of altarpiece tradition contrast personalities who could be in a film from 1962 or a surveillance clip from last week. The gold washes introduce an iconographic register.
The mark is open here, you can see how the figures were found — the drawing is present. That exposure felt right.
- “Do you believe it’s morning?” - “That’s the last thing on my mind.”
(( Four panels - 50” - 115” ea. - ink & paint on paper. ))"Do you believe it's morning?" is a question about reality, about whether the person asking trusts their own perception. "That's the last thing on my mind" is a refusal to answer, which is its own kind of answer. I was interested in that gap between what gets asked and what gets said back — and how that gap is where most of human relationship actually lives.
The figures — female, male, overlapping, in persistent profile — never address the viewer. Their gazes are internal or lateral, caught in awareness of others without the acknowledgment of them. This is the phenomenology of the crowd, of proximity without intimacy, rendered at a scale that implicates the viewer in the same condition. You stand before it the way you stand in a room full of people you are not quite part of.
The four panels let me work serially across nearly 16 feet, so the figures accumulate the way a conversation does — you think you're seeing the same exchange and then you realize the cast keeps shifting, the intimacy keeps reconfiguring. The gold is the pressure of something outside the frame — light, time, the sacred — pushing into what is otherwise a very contemporary kind of disconnection. I wanted the figures to feel both ancient and completely of this moment. Byzantine flatness, Japanese screen painting, the gold ground of altarpiece tradition contrast personalities who could be in a film from 1962 or a surveillance clip from last week. The gold washes introduce an iconographic register.
The mark is open here, you can see how the figures were found — the drawing is present. That exposure felt right.