Andromeda/GenZ 2015
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
So, new work. Well, you know, it's hard to talk about new work without talking about old work. One reason that I'm doing this sitting on my bed here instead of from a studio is, and one reason I ended up working on this project a lot recently is I broke my ankle skateboarding. So I'm still a couple of weeks away from getting off of crutches. Here's the break here. And then here's the plate. Yeah, and you know, I mean, I was just skateboarding. That's why I'm doing this from here. It started out with pictures of what I call Gen Z, which is the generation that's growing up now, that has been born, or is going to be born, or soon, or they're just kids right now and they're going to be growing up. into an environment where a lot of animals are extinct. And so I took the red list. And the red list is a list of extinct animals or animals that are going extinct or life forms that are in the process of, they're either endangered or they're in the process of becoming extinct. And I was superimposing those over pictures of things related to kids. And I used my own kids and my own imagery, my daughter, you know, newborn daughter. These were big posters, fairly big. I like to work very large scale. So these are 20 by 30. So they're just standard posters. So they're kind of meant to be larger and they become kind of a, I guess I'd lived with them for a while. I didn't exhibit, you know, I exhibited a lot in the past and then stopped. So I sat on these and then I started doing them again and I liked where they were going, They also were just kind of graphical experiments, you know, David Carson-ish knockoffs. I started experimenting with like tattoos and things.
And then I just, it just became a graphic project and I got bored with it. I started just compiling information about extinction and looking around the world and seeing where extinction was taking place and what kinds of life forms and everything from like viruses on up to, you know, your poster child for, like the polar bear, which was actually, this is a shot taken from a poster of a polar bear in a mall, which was pretty much how I envisioned my kids experiencing wildlife at some point, which would be in the mall. So literal. Then I started thinking about, well, you know, you can't have extinction without life. It got me out of that idea of just thinking about red lists superimposed over kids growing up in it, which just became a graphical exercise into kind of like looking at extinction in context. I go to places and I take a couple thousand photographs, Tijuana, Florence, San Diego, Malaysia, Singapore. I started trying to create an environment in which both this extinction event and Things like cures, viruses and global pandemics versus the positive kinds of things that have been happening and research into possible solutions, etc. I mean, it's not too dense for me, but I know it just becomes very decorative. And I started thinking about healing and addressing some of these issues and this kind of human situation that we're in now. And I started thinking about magic. So right now what we have are all of these images put together, large montage that it's going to get huge. And when I say huge, it'll either be presented in web format with many, many, many, many, many pages of this. Or it will be a wall, an entire wall of these is like a giant bulletin board. I started looking into spells and magic. So I started researching black magic, white magic, casting spells, earth spells, healing spells. And so right now what we have is all this imagery associated with creation and evolution and extinction, along with spells, healing the wounds, a lot of healing spells, some black magic, but that's where this stands.
Andromeda/GenZ 2015
Andromeda/GenZ
Artist Statement
It’s difficult to talk about new work without acknowledging the conditions under which it emerged. Andromeda/GenZ began during a period of forced stillness—I had broken my ankle skateboarding and found myself convalescing at home, off my feet, surrounded by unfinished ideas. This pause created the space to revisit earlier pieces and allowed a slower, more reflective approach to the development of the project.
The initial works were large-scale poster compositions, combining images of children—primarily my own—with the names and silhouettes of species from the IUCN Red List. These animals, marked as endangered or extinct, were layered over the everyday world of contemporary childhood. The contrast was stark but intentional: a generation growing up in an era defined by ecological loss, whose experience of nature may be mediated more by screens and simulated environments than direct encounter. In one image, a polar bear lifted from a commercial mall poster became a symbol of this new kind of wildlife encounter—literal, displaced, and strangely mundane.
Over time, what began as a series of visually-driven experiments grew into a more expansive research practice. I became interested in the broader context of extinction—not just the biological reality, but its emotional, cultural, and symbolic weight. My process included fieldwork through photography: documenting thousands of images across cities such as Tijuana, Florence, San Diego, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. These photographs function as a visual archive of a globalized landscape, where the signs of crisis are subtle, dispersed, and often aestheticized.
The work also shifted from focusing solely on loss toward a more nuanced framework—one that includes the impulse to repair. I began studying spells, rituals, and folk traditions from a range of cultures, particularly those related to healing, protection, and transformation. Magic, in this context, became a way to think through the symbolic work of artmaking: how images might function not only as representations of grief or damage, but as forms of intervention, invocation, or resistance.
In its current form, Andromeda/GenZ is a large-scale visual environment that operates as both archive and altar. It exists either as an immersive wall installation—like a vast bulletin board—or as an online project composed of hundreds of interlinked visual fragments. The material includes photographs, typographic elements, research texts, and references to magical practices: healing spells, earth rituals, protective symbols, and occasional gestures toward darker, more ambivalent forms of spellcasting.
This is not a didactic work. It doesn’t propose a single solution or moral stance. Instead, it stages a complex emotional space where extinction is not a closed event, but an ongoing condition—one that intersects with birth, memory, inheritance, and the instinct to imagine alternative futures. If the Red List marks what is vanishing, Andromeda/GenZ asks what can still be conjured in its wake.
