On mania, saying everything, and slowing down

February 24th, 2025

My mind has a tendency to bounce from one thing to another rapidly. This is a huge part of my practice. And I think because my brain is like this, combined with my interest in a wide variety of materials and mediums and conceptual topics, I find myself wanting each piece to simultaneously encapsulate as many things that I’m currently interested in as possible while also not overwhelming the viewer. It’s like every piece is a conversation where I’m trying my hardest to communicate a conspiracy I’ve uncovered on a cork-board by connecting a variety of images with red string without coming across as overwhelmingly incoherent or strictly insane but that the viewer walks away with the feeling of “wait maybe he’s onto something actually”. I want to bring people into that state of speculative mania, I think it’s an important space to enter. It’s also in many ways (some extremely destructive) the defining mindset of our time, this kind of “questioning everything” to a fault. Questioning everything with no real roadmap to answer any of those questions. I think because capitalism and the conditions it continues to place us in are so utterly and unignorably absurd, it’s natural that people try to find these ways to make sense of it in conspiracy theories or quasi-spiritual speculation. None of any of that really even scratches the surface of what the structure of our society is in my opinion, in the way that reading something like Noam Chomsky actually does, (or the fundamental nature of our reality in the way that the Tao te Ching or Eckhart Tolle does, again in my opinion). 

I used to see my practice as a way of engaging in some of the visual language of conspiracy-adjacent art as well as quasi-spiritual art but trying to actually point towards a more critically-thought-out truth underlying that. In that way I was engaging in some level of satire of the visual language of I was using. But now I kind of see my practice as a more genuine engagement with my own spirituality, building a visual language around that, and also cultivating an art practice that enriches that through the process of making work. What would the iconography of my ideal religion look like? Or what would my imaginary utopian religion’s iconography look like? What would the contemplative or devotional practice of my own religion consist of?

Not unrelated to that last point is that over the past few years I’ve been thinking a lot about how to slow my mind down when it comes to my practice because I think I have a tendency towards overloading my work. Which sometimes can be to its benefit but I often find myself having to reset the balance and return to some semblance of stark minimalism (at least relatively, for my practice). and then I slowly allow myself to add more and more elements to pieces until I feel like I’ve done too much and the cycle repeats. I also have used a lot of digital fabrication in my work over recent years which allows me to do so many things with material that would be pretty impractical and time consuming otherwise. But this year I’m really trying to do as much as possible by hand. This means embracing a much slower turnaround on work, and also sitting with the pieces for longer periods of time. Thinking about the importance of the hand in art, and the love and devotion that can be communicated through art that implies attention and labor rather than just a collection of good ideas.

A lot of this “slowing down” happens outside of the studio: doing more pleasure reading, paying more attention to what I’m eating and how I’m eating it, exercising, meditating (with my therapist), and perhaps most importantly, trying to get off my phone. My natural state is to rush. But beautiful things happen when we don’t rush. The world opens up.