These works comment on what I call a ‘cloud’ of an apocalypse, of systemic failure that feels like the pressure of a storm. This fuels the suicidal tendencies and contradicting subtle violence seen in the choice of subject matter, and the act of painting them is a statement of disagreement but also a longing for escape. I am painting my inner world that go beyond geography, a cathartic reality of personal nostalgia and the overstimulating turmoil both in the immediate socio-political global and internal. In a dissociative state, I paint ghosts of our existential beings in objects that hold presence in absence and symbolize death of innocence through horses.
"2 horses 20 shots and 1 big fucking panopticon" 180x150cm (2024) The panopticon symbolizes an unprecedented level of surveillance, manipulation, and overbearing governance that we could apply to most of the world. It is an entrapment that criminalizes resistance; a paradox of civil utopia with dystopian effects. Whether there is utopic intentions or it is a utopian facade with underlying evil intentions, the result is the demonstrated psychosis. Using paradoxical symbols, like glistening stars that hit like bullets, I underscore double-speak, rhetorics and euphemisms prevalent in politics and media. The effects of bureaucratic and oppressive systems poison us, wear us down and toy with our will to live and want to die. Due to the structure of the panopticon, prisoners are unable to see their guard resulting in the belief that they are constantly being watched, which conditions them. Some horses watch while others get shot. "Some Fall Through the Cracks, Others Die and Go To Heaven" 120x150cm (2024) Cracked pavement is a prevalent staple in mid-western and North American infrastructure, a symbol of a failing system yet nostalgic of home. Painted is my dog Sasha, of whom died while I was living in Berlin. Her passing was extremely painful as a part of me died when she did. Not long after, I visited her grave in Canada, a trip that unified my identity and the home within myself that was lost in Berlin. I hope to never forget the nostalgia that swarms my mind, even the cracked pavement. An unloaded gun and barbed wired rocking chair are contradicting symbols that contemplate suicide with an inability to follow through. The anti-thesis of suicide is hope, of "drawing at sticks", both options leading to an unknown. To dream of nostalgia is as if it didn’t happen but it is a hope that it will again. To live is to suffer and in death there is peace but we live through suffering for hopes of peace, a stark comment on what it means to be human.