Food for Thought
2024-2025
Mixed Media
(Ongoing)
American Vices is an ongoing series that interrogates the intersection of vice and commerce in America.
Considering the controversial sales categories of sex, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and guns, American Vices invites viewers to interrogate the symbolic iconography of these powerful products as well as the mythos that surrounds them.
Contrasting the Protestant idea of self-control and willpower with marketing’s expertise in persuasion, the series interrogates the enduring allure of these commercial products in both regulated and unregulated markets while interrogating the forms of freedom they promise.
The philosopher Erich Fromm famously split the seemingly simplistic notion freedom into two opposing dichotomies: freedom from vs. freedom to.
To what extent, as a society, are we entitled to freedom from the ills associated with these “products,” and to what extent, as individuals, are we entitled to chase the natural, human desires associated with such “vices”?
By refusing to deny the powerful allure of these vices and what they provide, the series asks Americans to contend with these fundamental aspects of human nature as multi-trillion dollar industries.
(Ill)iterate
2025
Acrylic & Mixed Media Collage on Canvas
(Ongoing)
(Ill)iterate is a mixed media series that reconsiders landmark texts of the Western literary canon within the context of declining literacy and fiction readership in the United States, alongside a political climate that is increasingly hostile to books and those that endeavor to study them.
Reimagining these works as abstract expressionistic collages that reference current events, the work questions the enduring relevance of the humanities as well as the increasingly contentious politics associated with crafting a canon that is representative of pluralistic experience.
By reimagining literary works deeply personal to the author – Marcel Proust (France), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia), James Joyce (Ireland), James Baldwin (US), Eve Babitz (US), Izumi Suzuki (Japan) – as composite, fractured images, the work implicitly questions whether the information age has given way to the image age.
By representing thematic elements of these works visually, and isolating specific, annotated passages, the work aims to deconstruct the text in the manner of Derrida, who famously asserted, “Il n'ya a pas de hors texte” (i.e. “There is nothing outside of the text.)
Working with paint, text, newspaper, found objects, and photography in a free-associative style, the task of reading and analyzing literature is implicitly compared to the mode of meandering conspiratorial thought popular online today.
In a time when images are increasingly winning the war for attention, the artist returns to a premodern world, one in which stories are told graphically: inside caves, on church walls, in bathroom stalls.
American Vices
2024-2025
Acrylic on Canvas
(Ongoing)
Food For Thought is an ongoing series exploring the question of cultural assimilation through the packaged food products.
Food can alternatively serve as a cultural common ground or a vehicle for cultural division. Sitting down to share a meal is one of the most time-honored means of cross-cultural exchange. On the other hand, eating “strange food” is often used as a means to other-ize and dehumanize marginalized cultures.
Taking international consumer-packaged goods (CPGs) as its core subject matter, the series frames the foods we buy as not just reflective of our views towards health, nutrition, and taste representative of our views towards other cultures, thereby reframing the supermarket isle as a battleground for cultural acceptance, relevance, and understanding.
With a designer-ly eye for modern, post-modern, outsider-art, and pop-art aesthetics, the series eschews photorealism in favor of a more accessible, handcrafted feel, yielding a humanized view of how food is packaged, processed, and sold to us.
It is the artist’s supreme hope that viewers walk away with a greater appetite toward foods from other countries and cultures.
