Perennial Trace
A solo show at Spalding Nix Fine Art
July 18 - September 12, 2025
About my new body of work: “Perennial Trace” on view as a part of the summer exhibition En Medias Res at Spalding Nix Fine Art
In this collection, I am exploring the relationships between abstraction, the sublime, tangibility, nature, and place and their influence on the perpetual evolution of our individual memories and constructed realities. Within this context, these paintings seek to visually articulate the multifaceted nature of recollection, reimagination, and remaking as functions of growth. Through these paintings, I aim to evoke a sense of constant transformation: capturing the simultaneity of creating and deconstructing; of experiencing, archiving, and remembering; of tracking in marks, gestures, and fields of color our own evolution.
Many of these paintings did not begin on fresh canvas; but rather, as continuations of existing works left in various states of completion. This allowed me to develop them in a way that only the passage of time provides. By incorporating new information, marks, and mediums into existing paintings; I am able to create works that are, at the same time, what they once were and something entirely new. The past iteration becomes the conceptual foundation and physical substrate for the new; further embodying the practice of recollection and reimagination as a facet of growth and mode of evolution.
The paintings’ compositions move in dense, textured, and repetitious layers across the canvas like light falling across water, garden blooms, or the canopy of a forest; composed of forms that are similar but never exactly the same. The edges shift and flow, while the color and opacity gradates; creating a feeling of experiencing a place or an event and the subsequent memory of it simultaneously. The layers are inextricably compounded; calling to the dynamic interweaving of our lived experiences, recollections, reactions, decisions, and the places in which they occur.
Through the lens of abstraction; I look to nature and its systems of growth and change that parallel our own. These places inevitably leave their distinct imprint on our lives: contextualizing our memories, providing emotional feedback, and informing the way we see the world and others. The line “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” from Langston Hughes’ poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” has underpinned the making of this collection. A river–in all of its rising, falling, rushing, and meandering– marks time by the depths of its riverbed and the tumbling and softening of its ancient sediment; all the while reflecting the ever changing world around it, and being made new through the collection of falling rain, melting snow, and the persistent carving of new bends. It is both a steady presence and an ever changing force: carrying fresh rainfall over ancient banks; making small shifts over time to create new bodies.
