IN THE STUDIO
Sunday, April 12, 2026
There is something about painting that feels transient to me. When I’m inside of it, I’m not thinking, I’m sensing. I become enveloped in color, in the way tones speak to each other, in how my body receives them. It feels less like seeing and more like feeling, like my nervous system is reading something I’ve always known but never learned how to name.
This began early. Around twelve or thirteen, painting became a place I could go to soften the edges of my day, to metabolize what I didn’t yet have the tools to understand. It was a quiet refuge. I would work zooming around aerially over my canvases, swimming through color and movement: pale pink, deep magenta, and the blackest black I could find. It became a universe for me to dissolve into. It didn’t require explanation, only presence.
I’m in Paris as I write this, and soon I’ll spend a week in Bordeaux living among Buddhist monks, sitting, listening, meditating. After that I’ll return to Paris, then go on to Venice for the opening of the Biennale. I feel a kind of anticipation around sharing this new body of work. I’ve spent the past year with it, shaping it, listening to it, letting it become what it needed to be.
I wanted to make something that sang for Koyo. Something that reached, dreamed, and opened into its highest expression. Levitating its way into consciousness.
Travel does something to me. It disrupts what I know in a way that feels a lot like dreaming. It loosens the grip of my conscious mind and lets something else come forward. I access my subconscious not by force, but by shifting context while staying rooted in my body. That balance opens things. It shows me desires I didn’t know were there.
Desire is a complicated word. For me it’s not just about pleasure. Desire is an impetus not only for my process, but also for the direction I choose in my life. It feels more like a compass. A felt sense, a quiet directive pointing toward what is next. To follow it doesn’t always mean to act, sometimes it just means to listen.
The Biennale feels like a threshold. I’ve spent the last fifteen years working toward the ability to make this kind of work, and now that I’m here, something is asking me to slow down and sit with it. To understand it more deeply, my relationship to it, and its relationship to the world. The Venice Bienniale is the world’s biggest stage for art and the temperature of what we will be experiencing in discussion among critics, scholars, and makers for the next few years to come.
When I look at it these pieces, I see a lot of myself. My questions, my disbelief, the depth of my feeling, but more than anything, my conviction for our preciousness.
So I’m trying to meet this moment with presence. To really inhabit this body while I can. To honor being here at all.
This next week, for me, is about focus. Letting my mind be something I can guide, and allowing my imagination to know its self as something closer to magic.
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
On Place Finding
I’ve been thinking a lot about place finding, about what it really means to belong somewhere.
Home is something we’re given. It’s assigned. It’s inherited. It’s often shaped long before we understand that we might have a choice in the matter. But when you begin to travel—across geographies, across interior landscapes—you start to notice that certain places resonate differently. Some spaces don’t just house you; they activate you. They draw something forward.
For the first time in nearly fifteen years, I feel comfortable. And what surprises me most is this: contentment has not dulled my ambition. It hasn’t softened my desire or quieted my curiosity. If anything, it has sharpened them. Contentment, I’m realizing, does not erode drive, it deepens it. It creates the conditions for more focused exploration, for a fuller encounter with what genuinely interests me.
I’ve long felt a tension in the way art making is taught — so often rooted in criticism as a primary mode of engagement. While rigor and discernment matter, I question what happens when critique becomes the dominant atmosphere. What kind of nervous systems does that produce? What kinds of artists?
I am interested in building ecosystems that are non-predatory. Ways of being held that do not rely on destabilization as a teaching tool. When the body feels supported, the mind can receive. It’s similar to what happens when you exercise, when you nourish yourself well, when you meditate: the noise recedes. Clarity becomes direct.
Lately, I’ve been in the water almost every day. Allowing my body to be held. Suspended. Supported by something as simple and miraculous as breath. There is a weightlessness in that practice that feels instructional. The body learns trust. The mind follows.
And what I’ve noticed is that nuance has become more vivid. The way light trembles at the edge of a leaf. The gentle movement across the canopy of my garden. The sharp, green scent of a tomato leaf, instantly returning me to my grandfather’s garden. These sensations feel fuller now. More dimensional. Almost overwhelming, but in a way that feels expansive rather than consuming.
Possibility feels tangible.
I think what has shifted is this: I have created an environment in which I am supported in my own authorship. In my own agency. And from that place, imagination doesn’t have to defend itself. It can simply unfold.
Perhaps place finding is less about geography and more about conditions. About building a life, internally and externally, where your body is held well enough for your mind to wander bravely.
And perhaps that is what home becomes.
Photo by Zachary Balber, 2026.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
The studio is truly a sanctuary for me. A room of my own where I can explore anything without permission. In this time, it has become its own kind of institution: a place where ideas are tested, where attention is practiced, where meaning is allowed to unfold slowly.
I keep returning to something Carrie Mae Weems once said: that at this point in her life, she’s trying to find the best way to say something that is true. That feels right to me. In my work, the compositions, the vibrational qualities, are not interested in being named. They want to be felt. Seen not only with the eyes, but with the entire body as a full, sensorial experience.
I’ve been thinking a lot about perception while reading “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of conversations with Robert Irwin” by Lawrence Weschler. There is a power in creating space for what’s in front of you to speak for itself, to tell you a story, to offer something new. When you stand in front of a James Turrell piece, you’re not trying to define it. You can close your eyes and still feel the color. It moves through the skin, through the pores.
That, to me, is the quiet power of abstraction. And it’s what I’m continuing to explore—making work that asks you to slow down, to feel, to stay with what cannot be easily named.
2026 is unfolding with many large and exciting announcements. I invite you to join my quarterly newsletter and stay connected as the work continues to expand.
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