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.