For over twenty years I’ve been paying attention to the stuff most people tune out. Riding the train. Waiting for a bus. Sitting in traffic. Washing your hands. The ordinary, forgettable rhythm of a day.
The Waiting series came out of that, fifteen years of painting anonymous figures caught in routine. I was trying to get at something I think of as everydayness: the fleeting, in-between moments that shape us without us noticing.
By making the familiar look strange, the paintings started pulling other things into view. Gentrification, class, ethnicity, the slow reshaping of neighborhoods. But underneath all of that was something more fundamental — a question about what it means to be present, or absent, in your own life.
More recently, the work has expanded to include z0glyphic 913. This project integrates painting, installation, and algorithm-guided imagery within a broader conceptual framework. z0glyphic 913 is a speculative symbolic language built from recursive mistranslation.
The system feeds its own outputs back into itself, mistranslates them, and loops again. Ambiguity isn’t a problem, it’s the process. I collect fragments of online content, news, memes, conspiracy threads, and run them through cycles of compression and distortion until new patterns emerge.
The work moves between algorithmic precision and physical mark-making. Whether I’m painting a solitary commuter or prototyping a symbolic language system, the question underneath is the same: how do we make sense of things that resist being understood?