ANTIQUITY
An Eye for an Eye, 2025
Oil on board
12 × 16 inches
Law 196 of Hammurabi’s Code:
”If a man has blinded the eye of a member of the awīlum class, his eye will be blinded.”
An Eye for an Eye #2, 2025
Oil on board
12 × 16 inches
Law 196 of Hammurabi's Code referencing the basalt stele in the Louvre.
According to Deleuze, every painting vacillates between the diagram (the disordered aspect that pushes a painting towards chaos and failure) and a code (the systematic structure that keeps the painting intelligible). What does it mean, then, to paint an actual code?
Antikythera Mechanism, 2025
Oil on board
11 × 14 inches
The Antikythera Mechanism is an artifact from roughly 100 BCE that was discovered in 1900. It displays a technologic know-how thought far beyond that of the Bronze Age and is the first known example of an analog computer.
Leaving Creusa, 2022
Oil on board
16 × 12 inches
Aeneas escaping Troy and losing Creusa.
Oh, dear God—my wife, Creusa!
Torn from me by brutal fate!
What then—
Did she stop in her track or lose her way?
Or, exhausted, sink down to rest? Who knows?
I never set my eyes on her again.
—The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles, book 2, line ~880
A lost-wife story with echoes of Eurydice and Ado (the wives of Orpheus and Lot, respectively).
Toy Scythe, 2015
Foam, epoxy, resin, acrylic paint
33 × 19 × 6
From the Middle Ages onward, death has traditionally been depicted as a solemn, skeletal figure holding a scythe, cutting down human life as a farmer cuts down wheat.
Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to imagine death as a greedy, whimsical child, acting capriciously and cruelly?
Figa, 2013
Foam, epoxy, acrylic paint
24 × 8 × 6 inches
Figa, the thumb stuck between the first and second finger, is an ancient and widespread gesture. It can be seen as a cross (with the thumb forming the upright member and the top of the two adjoining knuckles forming the horizontal member), or as a diagram of human intercourse.
Narcissus, 2013
Foam, epoxy, mirror, acrylic paint
4 × 24 × 24 inches
Mask and Two Masks,
2010–13
Foam, epoxy, wood, acrylic paint
27 × 15 × 10 inches
1) The elevated mask references that worn by the historic character of King Baldwin IV as he is depicted in Ridley Scott’s film Kingdom of Heaven (2005). The mask hides the king’s leprosy, which he suffered from as a child. Nancy Yates brilliantly designed costumes for the film.
2) The mask on the lower left is an interpretation of the Guy Fawkes mask, which appears in V for Vendetta (2005), directed by James McTeigue. Sammy Sheldon designed the costume. The film (and particularly the graphic novel that inspired it) hints that the mask covers the hero’s face, disfigured by fire.
3) The black mask, on the lower right, references butoh, the “dance of darkness.” The dance form was developed by Hijikata Tatsumi and Ono Kazuo. One of the central themes of the form is the trauma induced by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
4) How do our imaginations consider the horror of the “real” lying under the surface of the mask?
The Asp, 2012
Foam, epoxy, acrylic paint
18 × 5 × 5½ inches
Cleopatra committed suicide by letting an asp (Egyptian cobra) bite her breast.