The Cool of the Pond. Solo exhibition at 621 Gallery (Tallahassee, FL). On view July 2024.

There is a pond near my home which is a 7,000-year-old archaeological site. One afternoon, I took a trip to see it, with the idea that I would make a painting of it. I arrived to find it surrounded by a thicket, completely inaccessible and obstructed from view. 

It is this body of water that I imagine when reading a quote by the Renaissance artist Leon Battista Alberti: “What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of a pool?” 

I imagine myself groping at a reflected image of nature only to make it temporarily illegible as my fingers penetrate the surface and disperse the water into ripples. The image has become an abstraction. This idea of trying to grasp an illusion becomes a metaphor for the artist staring at an empty frame, a painting they’ve yet to make.

In these paintings, the frame itself is mutable: sometimes it might appear as a cross or a window. But it also contains a void—an indication of a space outside or within itself. 

This codependence between frame and pictorial space is accompanied by an audio recording of wind. It is not actually wind, but a human imitation—an attempt to personify nature. When Alberti spoke about the reflection in the surface of the pool, he was thinking about the story of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, eventually melting into a flower. To grasp at the reflection of nature in the pool is to discover a merging of self and nature in the mirrored surface, an infusion of bodily sensation into the unattainable coolness of the pond.