Installation view of the Gramercy International Prize–winning presentation at the thirtieth anniversary edition of The Armory Show in New York. In addition to nine paintings—some of which were custom-shaped panels, including one shaped like an iPhone—there were also readymade sculptural pieces, an adhesive vinyl, a sewn silk organza bag of preserved cherry blossoms, and a suite of photographs. The overall concept for this body of work—titled after one potential answer to the question “What is a meme?”—was to create a site of production, reproduction, and circulation of puzzle pieces in an analog culture of the digital. People will look at and engage art through their phones primarily, and so this work, jester-like, played along with the power structure imposed on visual culture by the tech industry. The gesture of this installation was evenly split fifty-fifty in its facetious approach and sincerity of embedded content.

This was the first painting made for a larger body of work comprising the Gramercy International Prize–winning presentation at the thirtieth anniversary edition of The Armory Show in New York.

Though formally inspired by Marc Chagall’s work in stained glass—particularly his windows for the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem—this painting primarily engages with the recently popular meme of “jester’s privilege”—the right to mock the powerful or engage in a range of generally socially unacceptable behaviors for the sake of comedy—by deploying an inversion of the jester logo of a children’s bookstore. The juggled books are hand-embroidered, and the sections in oil appear to be lit from within, while textured acrylics are “collaged” to the margins as a decentering of the passionate qualities associated with impasto and visible brushstrokes. Wasn’t it Frank Stella who said the problem with Abstract Expressionist painters was that they always got in trouble in the corners…? (1972, look it up).

The left side of the painting is like the spine of a book by way of its material treatment (Prussian blue book cloth and binding net), but its center of gravity is revealed to be on the right when the lights go out—the oval surrounding the human hand and the linen strips hanging from the painting glow in the dark.

This stretched-linen painting features lines excerpted from T. S. Eliot’s 1943 poetry collection “Four Quartets” run through with words borrowed from the 1971 song “Pure Imagination” sung by Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. I’ve been collaging these textual excerpts in various fonts and handmade and digital processes since 2021, but here the text is rendered in Lydian and Fraktur with gouache and handmade abaca paper collage directly on and embroidery in the weave of the linen. The prepared gesso center of the composition—with its borders resembling a torn paper edge—features an oil painting of the silver arches of an Apple store containing a shadow-puppet outline of a hand holding an origami crane and a lighter. Gestural acrylic marks of craquelure adhere to the raw linen along with preserved cherry blossom buds so that all appear to be falling down behind the oil painting. The origami crane is a key motif: like the flowers, it is commonly associated with Japanese culture, even though in reality origami gained popularity in the region through the importation of Friedrich Froebel’s nineteenth-century German kindergarten pedagogy. More recently, the U.S. federal agency DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has since 2020 been developing a new military plane based on the form of an origami crane—the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE). Given that DARPA was a 1972 rebranding of ARPA, the research organization that created the earliest model for the internet (ARPANET, 1969), my use of the origami crane is a visually compressed way of addressing the intersection of the internet and military technology.

Installation view of a solo show from 2023 in New York. While the street-facing windows of the space were also a component of the presentation, this view conveys the overall layout. The exhibition functioned as both a presentation of discrete artworks and a highly intentional and rigorously plotted installation. The works included a suite of seven paintings and a video shown on an iPhone as the first piece in that group. The show hung at two levels: one where paintings and drawings appeared at the height considered to be the professional standard, the other plotted along a line that more closely corresponded to the average height of a dog or a young child. The entire show was built like a sentence: it had a grammar and a syntax as one moved clockwise from the door.

This work debuted in my 2023 solo show in New York. In early 2024 it was included as part of the major thematic exhibition “CUTE” at Somerset House in London.

The largest component of this sculptural readymade is a design object commonly used in American universities, museums, and other pedagogical spaces—the Rowland 40/4 chair, here in a red-orange color that closely resembles the Pantone swatch for Tangerine Tango, the company’s 2012 color of the year. The walls in the gallery were painted Tangerine Tango to create an immersive environment for the viewer. On the chair are “book snakes” used in library archives to hold open antique or fragile volumes, a piece of character goods for cosplay, a handful of cherry blossoms I preserved, and a copy of my book Drive It All Over Me. This long-form art history essay is both my own work and an extension of the 2021 artwork Bad Driver by the artist duo Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda.

This work debuted in my 2023 solo show in New York. In early 2024 it was included as part of the major thematic exhibition “CUTE” at Somerset House in London.