Four Titles: The Tesseract / The Expulsion / The Exponential Era / 0–10
We live within a narrow band of expression which is optimized for communication, but not for truth. It is my belief that, given the world we are entering, the time has come to use multiple voices, each reinforcing the others to define a form or a concept accurately. What may once have been a quorum is now four models cross-checking each other's work. In the future, it may resemble how the brain itself triangulates an objective reality. But here, four titles and four voices serve as the frame around a single central theme.
With four titles for this exhibition, it is fairly safe to say that under traditional circumstances, it was meant to be four shows - by four artists, or at least four shows over the arc of a career. But given the circumstances of today's world, and of my personality, it is one compressed, multi-faceted exhibition around the central theme of transformation.
For a long time, I thought: one day I will arrive at a style, a voice, and it will be mine. I will stick with it. It has taken me twenty years of painting to realize I am every component of myself. At first, I made bodies of work in reaction to one another. Then I would use each opposing body of work to amplify, tighten, and develop motifs from another. It was in this mode that the different personalities emerged.
What we call the illuminated manuscripts, or the tight paintings, emerged as paintings about learning — about being able to work on a surface as though it were a bibliography. I would sit for a hundred or two hundred hours, listening to audiobooks while creating a dense, patterned world to mimic the chaos of nature. Then, upon completing that painting, I would carve out a component or motif from within and let it explode into a loose, figurative, expressive work. In every way the opposite process of the illuminated manuscripts, these ultimately became the essential figures. They satisfied the visceral, impulsive aspects of my personality — the elements that had been wound so tight during a hundred hours of meditation and learning.
Then came the map paintings, minimalist in nature. These were stained works, beginning in 2017. I had realized that my favorite part of the process was the inherent bones of starting a composition - all the fulcrums and points within where the work could become anything. Simple and skeletal, these lines sat at the foundation of my mural work: the exploratory marks I would make on a wall while defining a composition, the highest-stakes element of figuring out what went where. With the map paintings, you look, but you can never truly untangle form from abstraction. Like pareidolia, they were inspired by the human impulse to close the loop.
Then came the next voice: the reality engines. They were maps, but fleshed out and explored - still loose in nature, but dense fields of gradients and forms, which allowed me to begin tightening the screws in preparation for an illuminated manuscript. Within this ontology of paintings, each style developed as a different way of mark-making an antifragile behavior of breaking down one motif and developing it in the next body of work, and so on. Like a diverse ecosystem growing under predation pressure, cross-contamination, and the constant threat of collapse, the work only accelerated. And now, twenty years later, we find ourselves here: four titles, one show, a fractal practice in which four personalities and voices comment on one topic, while their diversity in nature simultaneously emphasizes the theme of transformation - and the multiverse of expression itself.
Think of a play in which one actor plays all parts. The actor changes expression, costume, intonation, and syntax to interact with themselves around the same material. Such is this show.
I am many people. I am many artists. I have many voices. How can an artist have only one voice today? The segmentation of social media, the fractured sources of truth and experience, the gigantic collision of information has fractured my expression in the same way a traumatic childhood can produce dissociation. The world has given us public and private personas — who we are on camera and who we are alone. The breaking of the fourth wall within our own souls is a central theme. While postmodernism began to play with this self-reflective mechanism, the acceleration of our era and the introduction of different personalities craving diametrically opposed realities has brought about many voices: some that soothe, some that accelerate, some that question, some that act on pure emotion. Expression is the arm that extends these impulses and feedback loops into coherent bodies — and it is within these differentiated expressions that the viewer is left to see which motifs pick up where others left off, transformed and deposited elsewhere.
The theme began as the tesseract, inspired by Alex Garland's work, in which four stories reinforce a reality that occurs between them. Much like the Alexandria Quartet, or Vivaldi's Four Seasons, four simultaneous expressions fill and define the negative space - which, in this case, is transformation.
We have left the age of innocence. The world around us is violating even Moore's Law. The Overton window is moving faster than ever. What is taboo one week is normalized the next. And within all this transformation and drama, innate human patterns seem to be playing themselves out. In many ways, it is all new technology on very old biology — new information on old rails. We are living inside this acceleration with 170,000-year-old biology, incapable of understanding exponentials, incapable of scaling our thinking and ethics to the population size we are now forced to engage. And so things are breaking. The garden of Eden has been left behind. We are in the desert of the unknown, searching for a new home — and much like Moses, we will be slaves to our own dependencies and vices, and to the very intelligent beings we are breathing life into.
Much like the theme of the show itself, it is a hybrid of myths. The Tower of Babel. The Expulsion from the Garden. Pygmalion and Galatea. A world in which each compressed element of narrative serves as a primitive building block, only to reveal - much as the neutrino once did - that it is turtles all the way down.
There is a thesis in which human beings live on a bandwidth of perception, exposed only to the sounds and elements of the universe we can actually digest. Anything outside that range we cannot process or feel — we are too fragile, too young as a species, to be exposed to the full brilliance of it all. Our biology, our minds, would simply break. In this regard, language, mathematics, and communication are all approximations rather than true forms. When we use the number 0, or 5, it is an economized, simplified version of a far more robust notion — a string of numbers that would extend forever, bending reality into human comprehension. And in doing so, we are limited from exploring the upper boundaries of consciousness, because as a species we can only approximate. The same is true of language: words are approximations of sounds fused with concepts, phonetic engines that carry broader implications, but compressed for the sake of not spending an entire day trying to describe the color of snow. We say white. We say grey. Life is compression and economy. It is the same reason our eyes reduce the world to symbols. Life itself is an economical set of symbols — push further, and the very vehicle of communication breaks. We are left with grunts and cave paintings, again trapped at the boundary where the universe is simply too much to process. And so, much like the visible spectrum, we live within a very narrow, convenient band of exposure, optimized entirely for communication, small groups, and the propagation of our genes. Our expression is not mapped to true, profound understanding.
And so I have developed four voices out of necessity — four vehicles for talking about one thing: cyclical transformation itself. Each leans on the next. One is about myth and learning. One is about expression, instinct, and the absence of thought. One is about reduction and simplicity — the tricking of the brain. And the last is about the wandering path of preparation toward isolation. In these four voices, a pattern emerges. A pattern that breaks the convention of one expression per person — which is uncomfortable, in that there may indeed be many words for white, or for grey. The point here is not economy, but the understanding of a natural process that is raw, exposed, and organic. Each style is an expulsion from the last. The next is a walk in the desert. And the arrival is a reinterpretation of norms and symbols - much as Jasper Johns reinterpreted the numerals themselves.
The paintings are a macro and micro representation of life: of stages, development, loss, and growth - of a craving for order and a disregard for form. And so it is in this spirit that I share my concept for Four Titles: The Tesseract / The Expulsion / The Exponential Era / 0–10.
Spring 2026