PAINTING
PORTFOLIOS
SPECTACLE & SPRAWL SERIES
2016-2023
NARRATIVE
SPECTACLE & SPRAWL SERIES
2016-2023
NARRATIVE
OF HOUSING
- SPECTACLE & SPRAWL
- AMERICAN BONES
- AMUSEMENT ARCHITECTURE
- EUROPEAN SERIES
- BIRDS ON A WIRE
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Spectacle & Sprawl Series
Spectacle & Sprawl is a series examining planned communities as instruments of class formation and cultural control. The work centers on the New York residential skyscraper 56 Leonard Street, known as the Jenga building and designed by Herzog & de Meuron, alongside the midcentury modern houses of Daly City, California, originally built for the working class and later absorbed into the mythology of American suburbia. By juxtaposing these two environments, the series critiques how American urban planning organizes land, wealth, and aspiration through architecture. One structure stacks luxury vertically in the sky, the other spreads repetition horizontally across the hillside, yet both are products of speculative development and market logic. Image transfers echo the reproductive qualities of mass housing and capital replication, while abstraction, mark-making, and color assert gestures of individuality within systems designed for standardization. The paintings question whether American individualism is genuinely lived or carefully staged within environments engineered to manage class, consumption, and visibility.
Daly City, Westlake, California
The Daly City house is a "Hyper Object" as it is iconic and holds many places in the American vernacular.
Daly City, CA, was one of the first planned communities to house workers and returning GIs. Architect Doelger's 1948 "House of the Moment" was a zeitgeist for the American Dream and midcentury modern architecture.
I am painting 1000 small 10x10' paintings on wood panels with an image transfer of Doelger's house. The conformity of the reproductive image of the house with the differing painting treatments mirrors America's prefab manufacturing efficiency and the mythos of American individualism.
︎︎︎ 2016-2023
︎︎︎ FOTO TRANSFER
︎︎︎ HOUSES 10X10” ACRYLIC ON PANEL
︎︎︎ DALY CITY, WESTLAKE COMMUNITY,CA ARCHITECT, Henry Doelger
56 Leonard St. “Glass Castle,”
Tribeca, NYC
My paintings of 56 Leonard St., the slender skyscraper famously known as the "Jenga Building" for its unique cantilevering architecture, are a majestic presence of a glass castle in the sky. It symbolizes the growing wealth gap at the ground level; it is part of the Spectacle & Sprawl series, an offshoot of the American Bones project. Through this series, I pair two distinct planned communities, residential skyscrapers, and Spectacle, with the sprawl of places like Daly City, CA, for the middle-class rows of identical manufactured homes. This work critically reflects the socio-economic disparities and architectural expressions that aggravate them in urban spaces.
︎︎︎ 56 LEONARD STREET, TRIBECA NYC ARCHITECT HERZOG DE MEURON
︎︎︎ ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, CHARCOAL ON PAPER, FOUR PAINTINGS IN TOTAL. THE LARGEST IS UNSTRETCHED, 6’5” X 40”
Spectacle & Sprawl is a series examining planned communities as instruments of class formation and cultural control. The work centers on the New York residential skyscraper 56 Leonard Street, known as the Jenga building and designed by Herzog & de Meuron, alongside the midcentury modern houses of Daly City, California, originally built for the working class and later absorbed into the mythology of American suburbia. By juxtaposing these two environments, the series critiques how American urban planning organizes land, wealth, and aspiration through architecture. One structure stacks luxury vertically in the sky, the other spreads repetition horizontally across the hillside, yet both are products of speculative development and market logic. Image transfers echo the reproductive qualities of mass housing and capital replication, while abstraction, mark-making, and color assert gestures of individuality within systems designed for standardization. The paintings question whether American individualism is genuinely lived or carefully staged within environments engineered to manage class, consumption, and visibility.
Daly City, Westlake, California
The Daly City house is a "Hyper Object" as it is iconic and holds many places in the American vernacular.
Daly City, CA, was one of the first planned communities to house workers and returning GIs. Architect Doelger's 1948 "House of the Moment" was a zeitgeist for the American Dream and midcentury modern architecture.
I am painting 1000 small 10x10' paintings on wood panels with an image transfer of Doelger's house. The conformity of the reproductive image of the house with the differing painting treatments mirrors America's prefab manufacturing efficiency and the mythos of American individualism.
︎︎︎ 2016-2023
︎︎︎ FOTO TRANSFER
︎︎︎ HOUSES 10X10” ACRYLIC ON PANEL
︎︎︎ DALY CITY, WESTLAKE COMMUNITY,CA ARCHITECT, Henry Doelger
56 Leonard St. “Glass Castle,”
Tribeca, NYC
My paintings of 56 Leonard St., the slender skyscraper famously known as the "Jenga Building" for its unique cantilevering architecture, are a majestic presence of a glass castle in the sky. It symbolizes the growing wealth gap at the ground level; it is part of the Spectacle & Sprawl series, an offshoot of the American Bones project. Through this series, I pair two distinct planned communities, residential skyscrapers, and Spectacle, with the sprawl of places like Daly City, CA, for the middle-class rows of identical manufactured homes. This work critically reflects the socio-economic disparities and architectural expressions that aggravate them in urban spaces.
︎︎︎ 56 LEONARD STREET, TRIBECA NYC ARCHITECT HERZOG DE MEURON
︎︎︎ ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, CHARCOAL ON PAPER, FOUR PAINTINGS IN TOTAL. THE LARGEST IS UNSTRETCHED, 6’5” X 40”
