When every side speaks, who is actually listening?
Congress
12 × 16
Oil Paint on Canvas
Congress began as two playful wax figures and a handful of floating bubbles. Somewhere along the way, they stopped looking like children at play and started looking like something much more familiar.
One figure stands upright, smiling openly, almost buoyant. The other leans in, tangled in itself, wrapped in knots while gripping a toy sword. Between them hangs an invisible tension. Is this a game? A disagreement? A performance? The answer shifts depending on who's looking.
The scattered letters spelling PLAY and the oversized speech bubble containing fight refuse to settle on a single story. Is the conflict genuine, or have we become so practiced at arguing that we've mistaken it for entertainment? The bubbles drift through the scene, beautiful but fragile, suggesting that certainty, outrage, and even victory may be more temporary than we like to believe.
The bubbles represent public opinion, media narratives, campaign promises, compromise, truth, civility
All of them beautiful.
All of them temporary.
The title, Congress, transforms the encounter into an allegory. It isn't a portrait of any political party or moment in history. It's about what happens whenever conversation gives way to performance, when winning becomes more important than understanding, and when people become so entangled in defending their position that they forget why they started speaking in the first place.
Like much of my work, Congress doesn't offer solutions. It offers characters. They are made from sculpted wax strings, painted in oil, and left intentionally open-ended. Their expressions are playful enough to make us smile, but ambiguous enough to make us wonder whether we're looking at them—or at ourselves.
When every side speaks, who is actually listening?
Congress
12 × 16
Oil Paint on Canvas
Congress began as two playful wax figures and a handful of floating bubbles. Somewhere along the way, they stopped looking like children at play and started looking like something much more familiar.
One figure stands upright, smiling openly, almost buoyant. The other leans in, tangled in itself, wrapped in knots while gripping a toy sword. Between them hangs an invisible tension. Is this a game? A disagreement? A performance? The answer shifts depending on who's looking.
The scattered letters spelling PLAY and the oversized speech bubble containing fight refuse to settle on a single story. Is the conflict genuine, or have we become so practiced at arguing that we've mistaken it for entertainment? The bubbles drift through the scene, beautiful but fragile, suggesting that certainty, outrage, and even victory may be more temporary than we like to believe.
The bubbles represent public opinion, media narratives, campaign promises, compromise, truth, civility
All of them beautiful.
All of them temporary.
The title, Congress, transforms the encounter into an allegory. It isn't a portrait of any political party or moment in history. It's about what happens whenever conversation gives way to performance, when winning becomes more important than understanding, and when people become so entangled in defending their position that they forget why they started speaking in the first place.
Like much of my work, Congress doesn't offer solutions. It offers characters. They are made from sculpted wax strings, painted in oil, and left intentionally open-ended. Their expressions are playful enough to make us smile, but ambiguous enough to make us wonder whether we're looking at them—or at ourselves.