Adjacent Texts
This page is not theory.
It is thinking inside a living practice.
The Book Remained the Same
The woman in these photographs purchased a copy of Sally Mann's newer book, Art Work: On the Creative Life.
In one image, she purchased the book at Barnes & Noble. In the other, she purchased it at Rizzoli.
The memoir costs exactly the same regardless of where it is purchased.
The text is identical.
The reader is identical.
The only difference is the shopping bag.
From that one piece of "information," the viewer imagines the woman's life.
The assumptions emerge almost instantly.
Barnes & Noble suggests one set of assumptions.
Rizzoli suggests another.
No additional information is required for the viewer to arrive at a fully formed idea of this woman's imagined life.
Now imagine this.
What we're not seeing is that Rizzoli was sold out of the book.
Barnes & Noble had a copy.
The woman called ahead.
The staff agreed to hold it.
She drove to the mall and picked up the book.
That's the image on the left.
Or, the woman tried Barnes & Noble first, but they were sold out.
Someone there suggested she try Rizzoli because that store is known to stock art books.
So she went to Rizzoli and found the book.
That's the image on the right.
Same woman.
Same book.
Different bag.
The packaging — the bag — assumes the role of the portrait.
The bag isn't the subject.
The viewer is.
The Container
On building a living practice inside a system
I'm a conceptual artist and it is hard to find physical spaces in which to share my work or even see it “in action.” So, I began building this website as a practical necessity. At first, I thought of it as documentation: a container into which completed projects would be placed.
Up until very recently, here’s what I would have done to make this website a reality: I would have hired a freelance web designer and then I would have engaged a developer to write the code and get the thing up and running. This time, however, I decided to mimic my own process and build it myself with AI.
Using ChatGPT, I built my own website. No coding involved. Together, we took the most unexciting template we could find on Squarespace and proceeded to obliterate it. Then we rebuilt it according to the logic of the work itself.
The process of building the site began to mirror the work itself.
I was working inside an existing system — templates, hidden rules, structural constraints, interface logic — pushing against it, adapting to it, trying to understand what it would and would not allow. Certain decisions produced unexpected consequences. Certain possibilities only emerged through repetition, sequencing, or accident. Meaning accumulated slowly through structure.
At a certain point, the distinction between the work and the container holding the work became less stable.
I had no interest in building a promotional website or a professionalized artist identity. Most artist websites are fundamentally marketing structures, even when they attempt to disguise themselves as something else. The work becomes secondary to legibility, navigation, career formatting, institutional readability, and self-presentation.
I wanted something different.
I wanted the site to function as an environment where the work could exist on its own terms. Not a showcase, but a container. The difference is important. A showcase explains and promotes. A container holds pressure, rhythm, adjacency, interruption, sequence, and accumulation. It allows meaning to emerge over time rather than delivering it all at once.
The site gradually stopped functioning as documentation alone. It became part of the governing structure of the work itself.
And because the site was built through an extended interaction with ChatGPT, another layer entered the process: constraint through dialogue. Much of the construction involved iterative exchange — literally, a conversation between me and AI — inside a system whose operations were only partially visible to me. That felt familiar. Much of my work already deals with procedural authority, hidden assumptions, institutional language, and systems that shape outcomes without fully revealing their logic.
I eventually realized I was no longer simply building a website about my work.
I was building another version of my practice.
The Public Mythology of Artistic Life
One of the strangest aspects of contemporary artistic life is the gap between how it is publicly presented and how it is actually lived.
Publicly, artistic life appears as a continuous stream of inspiration and momentum: exhibitions, grants, residencies, fellowships, publications, announcements, acceptances, invitations. Social media has intensified this effect in a big, big way. Artists are expected to maintain a visible narrative of forward motion. “Thrilled to announce.” “Honored to be included.” “Delighted to share.”
Over time, this creates a distorted picture of what a serious artistic life actually looks like.
What remains largely invisible is the administrative weather surrounding the work itself: applications, portals, deadlines, recommendation requests, submission fees, waiting periods, silence, rejection, recalibration, persistence.
The work develops inside this atmosphere. The work. That’s what’s missing.
What interests me is not rejection. Rejection has always existed and always will. And nobody, me included, loves it. But that’s not what interests me. What interests me is what repeated interaction with these systems teaches us artists over time.
Eventually, you begin to understand that institutional movement and artistic movement are not the same thing. A rejected proposal may still contain an important idea. A successful application may lead nowhere meaningful at all.
You also begin to understand how much artistic life depends upon the ability to continue without constant (or even frequent) external confirmation.
The portals change status. The work continues.
To me, that is the real ecology of artistic life: sustained attention.
Sequencing a Practice
Instagram as an Artistic Space
I do not use Instagram for promotion or even visibility.
I use Instagram as a place to think visually — in public.
And that shift changes everything.
Social media encourages the idea of the single successful image. A post performs and gets likes, (or doesn't) and then it's on to the next one. But over time, I have become much more interested in what happens between images. Adjacency. Rhythm. Repetition. Interruption. Scale. Echo. Delay.
An image beside another image becomes a different image. A text piece interrupts visual momentum. A recurring object begins functioning almost like punctuation. Meaning accumulates slowly through sequence and return.
Screenshot of my Instagram account, May ‘26
Increasingly, I think of the Grid not as presentation, but as arrangement. And arrangement is never neutral. Nothing is unintentional. The placement changes the meaning.
What interests me is the evolving visual intelligence created by sustained sequencing over time.
The Grid allows thought to remain mobile. But the Grid remains unstable, revisable, alive. Images disappear. Others return unexpectedly. Certain ideas intensify through repetition. Others quietly fade away.
Looking becomes a form of editing.
The Instagram account itself becomes part of the artwork, part of the practice.
The account itself becomes an authored space.
“So, what kind of brushes did Guston use?”
Readers of the Work
One of the hardest things for an artist to learn — and I’m learning it these days — is that witnessing is not evenly distributed.
Some people can accompany a becoming. They’re willing to look at work that is still in development and take the time to think it through, ask questions, and stay curious.
Others can only recognize outcomes.
Still others simply choose not to make room in their lives for sustained attention to another person’s work. That one feels crappy, especially when it becomes clear only after one person has spent a significant amount of time engaging with the other’s work.
It’s pretty natural to take the asymmetry personally, whatever the root cause. So we tend to think, If so-and-so isn’t saying anything, it must be because the work is lousy. It’s a very short distance between the lack of attention and the creeping self-doubt.
Back when I focused on photography, I had some readers: people who commented on individual images and said things like, Ooh, I love this one. Or, Great capture. (I hate the word “capture,” FYI!)
These days, however, my work requires a different kind of reading. I have very few readers. And, I’ll be honest: I wish I had more.
A colleague was recently commenting that she has so few people to talk to about her work. “I need to talk about my work.” Yup. I get that. And you know what I said in response? “Yes, you do. We all do. I’ve decided to make it a goal: to go out and find a real reader.”
Real readers — people willing to stay near the work while it is still becoming — are rare. But they matter enormously.
And the process must be mutual. I don’t just want readers of my work; I want to be a reader of other people’s work, too.
I want dialogue. And perhaps, too, a reputation for being the reader who stayed.
Restraint
While working on a series of textile tape measures, I worried that viewers might not understand what was being measured. They wouldn’t “get” the concept.
My first instinct was to add wall text. Not a sentence or two, but the kind of explanatory language artists often reach for: body image, cultural expectations, sizing standards, social pressures, historical context.
In other words, a small dissertation.
Instead, I added one word:
(inches)
That was enough.
The viewer immediately understands that the work concerns bodies, measurement, and the judgments that inevitably attach themselves to both.
The experience reminded me that wall text should not function as a cut-and-paste excerpt from a catalog essay.
Its purpose is not to carry the meaning of the work.
Its purpose is to help the work carry its own meaning.
Restraint is often uncomfortable because it removes the easiest solution. Once explanation is no longer available, the work itself must become clearer.
The challenge is rarely finding more words.
The challenge is trusting fewer of them.
“But What About the AI?”
Painting, Smoking, Eating, Philip Guston, 1973, Courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum
People often ask me about the AI in my work.
I understand why. We are living through a moment in which the tool itself attracts enormous attention.
But AI is not the subject of the work.
If I had photographed every portrait in Under Continuous Review myself, the project would remain conceptually unchanged. The structure would be the same: a portrait, a fragment of human narrative, and a system of evaluation operating upon them.
The work is not concerned with how the images are made. It is concerned with what happens when systems decide what information matters and what information can be ignored.
Discussing AI in this context can sometimes feel like standing in front of a Philip Guston painting and spending twenty minutes discussing the brand of brushes he used.
The brushes are part of the production of the work. But they are not the subject of the work.
The portraits are fictional. The judgments are familiar.