Space X (2024)

paper doll, furniture, abstract painting, drawing, video, mixed media installation

Space X (2024)

An installation inspired by Mark Fisher's characterization of "capitalism" as a single agent — likened to the protean, voracious monster in *The Thing from Another World*.

The work comprises: a painting in the manner of Manet depicting the contemporary attention economy; video footage of a face disintegrating while emitting bodily fluids in various colors; replicas of masterworks of abstract painting; a model of a man at an office desk who continues working while ingesting pills and energy drinks; a model of a cryptocurrency mining machine; and "The Thing."

In The Conservatory (2023) 177.5 × 238 cm, pastel on paper

Manet's late-nineteenth-century paintings — and *In the Conservatory* (1879), which this work emulates in particular — effectively illustrate a defining characteristic of modernization: the process by which a sense of place is stripped away. A conservatory is a site that uproots plants from their native environments and domestically tames them, while simultaneously rendering the context of the conservatory's own location ambiguous. Moreover, the fashion and gazes of the figures he depicts appear less as specific individuals than as abstracted, socialized representations of "the human".

In The Workplace (2024)   71.5 × 200 × 200 cm, paper, styrofoam, mirror, cigarettes, refuse, pill case, refuse

The cultural anthropologist Marc Augé named the placeless spaces proliferating in our capitalizing, supermodern present "non-places." In these spaces, he argues, people and places alike remain anonymous, solitary, and homogeneous — forming no relationships with the specific histories of the location or the individuals they encounter. The concrete examples he cites are spaces of excessive traffic for people and goods: airports, motorways, large supermarkets. However, in recent years, the fluid employment conditions and the nomadization of our work (Bullshit Jobs) through remote work have rendered our working environments and office spaces "non-places" as well. Seated perpetually before a PC monitor, sometimes eating and drinking at the desk, borrowing strength from caffeine and sundry supplements to endure the hours of "work" — is our very body, too, being absorbed into this homogenization?

Abstract Paintings (2023)

Asunder.3 / Asunder.13 (2023), 155.5 × 118.1 cm, paper, wooden frame

Lavender Gut Mist (2023), 106.7 × 210.3 cm, paper, wooden frame

Abstract Blit Organ (2023), 90 × 90 cm, paper, wooden frame

Biofluid Manifestation (2023), 87.5 × 120 cm, paper, wooden frame

Blood Rain Painting (2023), 150.9 × 117.3 cm, paper, wooden frame

The period during which Abstract Expressionist painting and its central critic and advocate Clement Greenberg were constructing their theoretical framework overlaps with the era of the Red Scare in postwar America — so-called McCarthyism. Behind the production and valorization of their paintings — which abandoned the reproduction of specific motifs and were reduced to the flatness of the picture plane, resulting in works that were, at the very least, "impossible to tell what is depicted" — the influence of the political climate of the time can be glimpsed.

The function, value, and general understanding of abstract paintings as we encounter them today — hanging in the luxury condominiums we see in films, where they register as "incomprehensible, yet recognizably art" — are in no small part a historical product that was "politically neutralized" with political intent. Since Abstract Expressionism concluded its role as propaganda for liberalism, this function and value have continued to be reproduced — through Neo-Expressionism, Zombie Formalism, and the like — as speculative "art" commodities.