The cocktail paintings, infused with nicotine and alcohol, explore the complexity of filial bonds and generational impact through blown-up snapshots. Their tobacco-brown B sides reveal elements of the artist's archive, blending literature, philosophy, and intimate confession.

"A father and daughter (early 70s) at Pineway Trails, a small lake and summer getaway in Ohio where we used to go to swim. I see my slim mother leaning against my grandfather’s girth. I see his weird towel skirt, the blurry swimmers, a long dock and ripples of sunlit agitated water. Like anyone else would I see a nice and fun filled summer day.

My mother and grandfather had a complicated relationship. His wrongness scarred her life, there’s no question about that, and her wrongness troubled him but wasn’t scarring. He always had the upper hand. In being unable to free herself from him she was the big loser. There was love on both sides and certainty a steadfast loyalty, which is what I really mean when I say the relationship was complicated. Hanging in there with people is nothing if not complex.

In one of the telephone recordings I made of her before she died I asked her about her father—himself recently deceased. I asked her what he was like. A tyrant. I pressed her, okay, but what else? An abusive tyrant. Knowing her I laughed and I pressed again and she relented—a little. Well he could be a lot of fun, horsing around with the kids, but that’s only because he had a crush on one or more of the girls, he liked young girls, so that’s the only reason, I realize now that I’m older, that’s the only reason he messed around with us.

Her resentment was real and unrelenting and I have no doubt justified.

But why should I spoil such a nice day by highlighting and foregrounding these very personal and hidden traumas from a generation ago. Why expose what isn’t there in that pleasant moment? I’m not sure I even know why exactly I do this all the time. I do know that I’m tired of lies and surface-only reflections. Where do they get us? I look at these old photographs and see the smiling faces and I know they will be forgotten and the same things that tormented them will torment others and as well will be forgotten.

What is a photograph? You can hold it in your hand but the image is lost to time. Photographs offer us some tangible proof of something. But proof of what exactly? I should be able to say something about what I’m doing here it’s just that summarizing statements tend to close a door that I work hard to keep open. Questions drive me further than answers do. To me there’s a real value in seeking out and revealing the complexities embedded in these seemingly banal snapshot images and seeing how far down the rabbit hole I can go. My mother once said about death It’s so final and I would add that it’s maddeningly simple too. Everything is just gone. Piling complexity upon complexity seems to bring something back.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. – Walter Benjamin

I offer up this work, all of my work, in a spirit of redemption rather than compounded pain. What might be gained from fixing one's gaze toward what has, ostensibly, already happened and is finished? All of our lives are an accumulation of diverted possibilities, dreams, hopes, etc, which, when left unexamined, produce a future of incalculable dysfunction and violence. I think that’s why I’m willing to spoil the sunny day because as James Baldwin poignantly observed Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Actual size and dimensions of the original photograph.

This work was made in Painesville, OH and Brooklyn, NY and exhibited at OFFSCREEN in Paris, France in October 2024.