I was a Classics major in college and studied Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit before I started doing art. I've lost most of those languages by now but it all left me with a permanent habit of seeing the present - as digital or meta or momentary as it might be - within the broader arc of its precapitalist / prechristian antecedents. All of my work descends to some extent from this impulse.
Between 2015 and 2020 I worked and showed exclusively as part of the performance group Royal Osiris Karoake Ensemble (ROKE) with theater artist Tei Blow. ROKE is an ongoing devotional practice that works towards building a ritual language for the VHS/internet age. Our work is a mix of theater, installation, psych concert, cult worship, and party that attempts to look at contemporary cultural phenomena through the long, warped, semireflective lens of history.
During COVID I began work on a series of tempera paintings and bronze sculptures within a psychedelic Classical canon, which have grown into their own practice. In these works I have been developing an allegorical vocabulary for the empire of this moment, which might be remembered as something like the Final Years of Great Abundance.
How will we memorialize this Soft Empire?