Peering at Faint Lights in the Distance
Peering at Faint Lights in the Distance traces a moment in which perception fractured and reassembled. The works originate from a sequence of visions that brought together disparate elements of my life—illness, fear of losing my ability to make art, family memory, and the presence of death—revealing them not as separate experiences, but as interconnected states.
At the time, I was living in New York, beginning my MFA at Columbia University. I struggled to find a subject for painting while simultaneously confronting the physical toll of working with toxic materials. Breathing became difficult. Each act of painting felt increasingly tied to the possibility of self-destruction. The fear of having to abandon art—something foundational to my identity—began to surface.
This period coincided with an acute awareness of space and enclosure. In my apartment, a small window above my bed was my only connection to the outside world. Each morning, the faint light filtering through dirt and leaves created the sensation of being buried—of looking upward from within the ground. That distant, dim rectangle of light became both a point of orientation and a psychological anchor.
The works translate this condition into material form. Painting and sculpture function not as representations, but as environments—spaces where descent, weight, and suspension coexist. Slate, steel, and concrete introduce a sense of gravity and containment, while surfaces of oil paint hold shifting fields of color that oscillate between emergence and disappearance.
Throughout the series, there is a recurring tension between collapse and illumination: a movement downward into darkness, and the simultaneous presence of distant, guiding light. These “faint lights” are not sources of clarity, but points of persistence—suggesting that even within states of uncertainty, disorientation, or fear, there remains a minimal but enduring orientation toward something beyond.
Rather than offering resolution, the works remain suspended in this in-between state—where the body, memory, and perception are continuously renegotiated. The works do not depict visions; they operate as their residue—material traces of a threshold between fear and understanding, where perception becomes unstable and meaning begins to reorganize itself.