exhibition of new WORK at Park Life Gallery
‘STICKS AND STONES’
220 Clement Street, SF CA
April 11th-May 18th, 2025
In Sticks and Stones, I (re)turn to the alphabet—the first system of expression many of us learn. Letters, repetition, shapes, and gestures: the fundamental tools of communication. We all start here, forming words to articulate what we want and need. Over time, we learn all the power language can hold—to soothe or to sting, to connect or divide, to coerce or question.
This new series of small paintings (oil and acrylic on panel) explores abstraction, visual language, and the naming of color. Each piece corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, built from stripes and dots—abstract yet suggestive of a shared, universal mark-making. The characters nod to typography while skirting legibility, inviting a more intuitive, open-ended kind of reading.
The palette for each painting is drawn from colors that begin with that letter—A for Aquamarine, B for Brown, C for Cerulean. The process—making lists of colors alphabetically, mixing them in paint methodically, masking off stripes, tracing circles—became a kind of comfort. I use a similar trick to fall asleep: choosing a category and moving through the alphabet, organizing, naming, remembering. I’m usually asleep by W. The scale of the panels, reminiscent of notebook pages, was also a comfort–familiar and handheld. As I painted, I found myself thinking of people in my life whose names begin with each letter. It became a quiet way of making something for them.
This body of work continues my ongoing interest in systems as generative frameworks—ways of structuring time, creating order, and engaging with color anew. Here, the alphabet becomes not only a formal constraint, but a deeply human one—a way of revisiting how we begin to make sense of the world, how we continue to reach toward connection, and how much can be held in the smallest shapes
