I've been inside lately. Inside my house, my studio, my own head. Outside, things closed, then reopened. The sun went up and down, and my mind, bored from being inside so much, folds back in on itself every night. I dream of foreign cities I visited once, I spend time with friends long gone, and I retrace the steps of a younger version of me. I feel like a ghost, haunting my own life.
T H E M U L T I V E R S E
Opens June 4th at Thinkspace Projects in Los Angeles. On view through June 25th.
It's 2021 and I'm a ghost. I just found out my old friend Jason Chase is gone. Our relationship had fractured in recent years and I thought I would have time to fix that someday. It feels like a different life now. It's 2007, Jason and I are in a show together. We're young and plucky. I'm listening to a jokey playlist we made. Only it's 2022 and I'm alone, painting.
It's 2004 and I'm a ghost. It's my first gallery show. My friend Wes is there. He used to come by, have 3 PBR's too many and drunkenly tell me I was better than Matisse. I wasn't. But Wes believed in me back then when I really needed it. I'm painting in a band T-shirt that Wes gave me in 2005. It's 2022. The band broke up in 2008.
It's 1999 and I'm a ghost. I'm painting my first astronaut and I don't know that I'll spend the next 2 decades doing the same thing. I don't know what I'm doing. I tell my younger self to keep going.
It's Christmas 1997 and I'm a ghost. I just returned from 3 months in Italy and I'm jet lagged, confused, and crashing on my friend Chris Ostoj's couch in Brooklyn. Only he's not here, so I'm alone on Christmas. In Italy I listened to Chris's band on a cheap Walkman that got stolen on a train. I'm humming the song now. It's 2022 and I'm in LA. Chris grew up in Yucaipa, not far from here. He left it behind and didn't talk about it much. He spent his last days there, though.
It's 2022 and my friends are ghosts, too. They're no longer around but I do what I can. They live on in my paintings.
The Multiverse is a show about escaping back into my own life and finding it again. I went back in time and walked in the footsteps of younger versions of me, revisiting places from my life and from my paintings.
