It changes all the time. Right now, I’m obsessively generating artificial intelligence images of catastrophes, cutting them up, and editing them into my style. The pictures pose salacious questions like, “What would it look like if two commercial airplanes crashed into each other over a city?” or, “What would it look like if Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish had a baby?” I carry the images into the studio like a sketchbook and pull moments into my abstractions. You never see those full images in the work, just traces of a moment or an idea.

To bruise a painting, you have to think of the painting as something that hurts. The formal decision there is to create something that experiences pain. It’s a different mode from making a representational painting of someone who has been injured, because the surface has been exposed to violence.

The cold, institutional aesthetic of the system produces an inevitable aura of consent. You have these documents that visually appear with the authority of bureaucratic infrastructure even as they quietly encode and optimize power. One example would be Terms of Service documents with unilateral updating and continued use as consent. The neutral aesthetics of TOS documents help them feel inevitable and unavoidable even as they govern vital yet privately contained systems like Google. The aesthetic of the system itself is compelling.

At that stage, my work reaches viewers who encounter content as a delayed, processed, and mediated product. Large art repost accounts curate feeds to reach these buffered viewers. You see the same phenomenon with political content on social media. Large influencers present the news to their audiences in a curated way that reinforces their ideological position. When a painting enters that broader system, I lose control of the context that I build on my account. The painting takes on a new cultural life. When my art reaches a compressed and pixelated Instagram story with a caption in a language I don’t speak, that’s success.

Online viewers largely aren’t impressed with the art world at all. Galleries have to choose between creating an online presence that reaches the largest internet-native audiences and projecting the power and authority they rely on in the art market. It’s a tough spot, but the galleries that do it best are the ones that choose to fish for engagement like other companies do or lean out entirely.

My work can’t really be misread. It’s more of a mirror than a statement.

It isn't ethically complicated at all. Art isn't about being ethical. It's about seeing or making something others can't and helping them see it too, even if it’s fucked up.

I’m working on a sculpture right now in which I am using a 7.75ct richterite-winchite gem with an internal rainbow effect from Badakhshan, Afghanistan. The idea of playing with a material that borders on singular in size and rarity while also being incredibly delicate is very precarious in my studio, where I am not delicate at all.

There’s an article about Netflix on the BBC from 2022 with a subtitle like, “Trying to watch some of Netflix's more recent series all the way through,” says Paul Weiner, “feels a bit like cramming frankfurters down your throat in a hotdog-eating contest. Readers outside the US may not share the American enthusiasm for competitive hotdog swallowing. But maybe they can relate to the feeling.” That quote is in the BBC because I offer salacious quotes to journalists who searched for sources on Twitter. The quotes are sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes funny. The BBC has a lot more power than I do, but can they take a joke?

Reality is constructed around you, and the builder is often an algorithm.