In Creation

Painting is, in general, the expression of a search for social structures, approached emotionally rather than analytically. Most of my paintings explore societal questions — separation within migration, the paradoxes of lives lived inside war — alongside research reaching toward cognitive science, physics, and relativity. For me, painting is a site of exploration: through form and color, new intuitions arrive almost unbidden, giving me ideas I then continue through other means. It isn't where I arrive knowing what to say — it's where saying begins, before I have language for it. Much of what I make elsewhere traces back to something that first surfaced here.

Photography began as a search for the symbol of the moment — the moment as symbol of a social structure, a norm, a construction, a particular way people find each other. That was the starting point: making visible how connection is built. More recently, it has shifted toward trace — how things link and come apart, what mark is left behind. There's a kind of magic here too — the magic of a moment one cannot fully anticipate, of letting oneself simply be, arriving at a true relationship to space. Where painting generates intuition through abstraction, photography confronts it with the real.

My campaigns were an exercise in assemblage — asking what placement means, what it means to put things in certain positions, as in a performance, and what that reveals about the system we live inside. For me, campaign and performance are the same thing at their core: provoking reflection through association rather than direct statement, continually opening new spaces for reflection and, potentially, action. This matters because placement is never neutral — where something sits relative to other things already carries an argument about power and norms. Unlike painting, this work is inherently public and collective.

A real film as I see it is something I've never had time to finish, but it has always centered on exploring bureaucratic systems — how, often with humor, societies establish and sustain themselves. I pair it with theatre because in all my plays, it was the same exploration: of the social, and the norm that prevents new possibilities from being created and opened. What draws these together is narrative and embodiment — unlike painting or photography, which work through intuition or trace, film and theatre require duration, character, a body moving through time, giving shape to a critique that stays abstract elsewhere.

This is an exploration of respect for everything that exists, for all that surrounds us — finding the marvelous and taking hold of it to create a relationship to the world that is intimate and strong. It's meant to inspire people to create beauty around themselves, to marvel again. Beyond that, it's about discovering, in the smallest things, one's own feelings. Of everything I make, this is the most private — where attention turns inward as much as outward. Writing starts with attention itself: looking closely at something small until it reveals why it matters.

Music was an exploration of my convictions and how I wanted to share them. I came to it late — at 21 — and for this album, sought to connect to social pain, personal and global. Much of it circles around recognition — of the fragility that the moment imposes, defining things we may not want defined for us, personal or societal choices alike. This is what makes music different: the most direct, most exposed medium I work in. There's no canvas to mediate the feeling, no camera between me and what I'm trying to say — just voice, carrying conviction directly.