Using the language of sculpture, my work investigates the layered illusionistic, reified, and hermeneutic qualities of representation in visual culture through the means of reshaping, reordering, veiling, and unveiling objects, events, and audiences. I work to reveal the physicality of surfaces, or by using the semiotic languages of an image, speak in dialogue to a superficial resistance to depth. I am invested in not uncovering a core truth, but how when falsehoods collapse, other ones are uncovered—revealing the perpetual and cyclical nature of information. Inversely, I aim to explore how an act of obscuring is able to construct new understandings, where the hidden now acts as content. In other words, in removing seeable information at the point of visual consumption—like narrative told through printed image and text—a phenomenological absence is felt in its place.

I equip materials that are ordinarily used as a substrate to hold exterior semiotic meanings—such as printed paper, wood and concrete used in the skeleton of architecture, and digital screens—and ones that act as invisible membranes—such as reflective and mirrored surfaces, windows, and the illumination of a stage light. When their physical qualities are laid bare, our relationships to these materials become resensitized and again visible in tangible space. In my 2025 work, A Rubbing of a Landscape Through a Window, a polished steel plate extends off a wall from four long screws. On its surface, in clear varnish, is a dissection of the yin-yang symbol through a binary matrix visualization that goes through all 16 possible combinations of the symbol’s components and the absence of them—the yin section paired with the yin dot, the yang section with the yin dot, the yang dot alone. By foregrounding the diagrammatic representation of a symbol, it is in phenomenological conflict with the reflective material quality of polished metal. A discordant quality is revealed in the sign’s limited ability to communicate, but reified as an object, a harmony arises from its clashing parts.

In unravelling illusion, I am concerned with reframing the spectator as an active player in image making. The seemingly distinct and dismembered conditions of roles in visual media and representation—particularly the circuit between the subject, the producer, and the audience—is something I work to nullify by articulating a fluidity between the three. Also, I employ the vocabularies of the stage in magic and theatre—such as misdirection, distraction, superimposed narrative realities, and frontality—to conduct attention to who and what is “spotlit” or “staged.” My references to stage magic are concerned with destabilizing the event—or, the moment that situates time into a before, during, and after—by shifting emphasis away from it or by severing it from context. In another 2025 work, And Then A Dove Appeared (Weather Balloon), a cement slab is laid on a concrete gallery floor. On top of it, is an open page spread of newspaper printed with an ambiguous image of an exploding weather balloon. Each corner of the image is marked with printer crop marks and the pages are held down by two cut pieces of metal square tubing that mimic both an architecture and also graphite. At the threshold of Earth’s atmosphere, the event of a popped weather balloon takes place. But, isolated in one image frame, it is visually obscure; the event fails. Additionally, the image is roughly two thirds of the way through the newspaper and is weighted down. Unable to flip through the pages, spectators are kept within the section of “climax” in a traditional book narrative.

Through this, my work first exists as disembodied intervals, and then is reconstructed into new logical compositions and understandings. In contemporary visual culture, an immediate transmission of messages to audiences is a priority. I aim to dissolve and interrupt these constructed states—of materials made subservient to physically flat sign systems, of the delegated roles in image making, and of time established through the event—in order to remould a present-day reality. One that engages with non-linear and deviating ways of looking in order to disrupt the authority of the dominant visual culture.