2. Finding the Language

Finding the Language: Following the Threads Toward Alternate Sides

When I look backward at the development of my current practice, it is tempting to construct a clean progression—to identify a moment when one idea led to another and eventually became Alternate Sides.

That isn't really how it happened.

The work seems to have emerged through the convergence of ideas and experiences that appeared at different moments in my life. Some were things I had been explicitly taught. Others were habits I developed without recognizing their significance. Some disappeared beneath other concerns for years before resurfacing in another form.

Only recently, after revisiting old drawings, paintings, critiques, sketchbooks, photographs, and writing, have I begun to understand how some of these threads relate.

At the center of my current investigation is a question that took me decades to arrive at:

Can the formal construction of an artwork produce conditions for sustained looking?

I did not begin with that question.

I had to find my way toward it.

Learning to Control the Frame

Some of the earliest pieces of this language appeared in high school.

I attended a school with a robust art program where I was able to study photography, computer art, advertising, art fundamentals, drawing, and some painting. There was a great deal of experimentation, but two lessons from my teacher, Mrs. Fuller, stayed with me in particular.

One was composition.

She taught us that we could control how something was encountered simply through the way we framed it. Zooming in, cropping, moving a subject toward an edge, or allowing part of it to disappear could transform an otherwise ordinary observation.

It seems elementary to me now, but at the time the realization was significant.

I wasn't limited to recording what was in front of me.

I could decide how to see it.

The other lesson was negative space.

Mrs. Fuller taught us to look at the spaces around and between objects rather than concentrating exclusively on the objects themselves. Drawing the space surrounding an object could reveal the object through its context.

That was a revelation.

Negative space was not nothing.

Absence could describe presence.

I began experimenting with these ideas in my sketchbooks and drawings, and they became tools I would continue using long after I had forgotten when I first learned them.

Mrs. Fuller also introduced me to something I understood much less clearly at the time.

When I was preparing college applications, I hoped to attend Cooper Union. She explained that they were particularly interested in conceptually strong work. To help me understand what she meant, she described a former student's response to a self-portrait prompt. Rather than simply rendering himself, the student had used a mirror to show his body in separate reflected segments.

I attempted something similar for my own application, drawing myself in three segments using a hand mirror.

I understood the visual device.

I'm not sure I understood the idea.

At that point, I was still primarily interested in whether I could render something convincingly. The distinction between making an accomplished image and constructing an image around an idea had been introduced to me, but it would take many years before I understood why that distinction mattered.

Sustained Looking

In 1998, I entered the illustration program at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Much of that year was spent drawing from live models. Some poses lasted for hours. I remember working on pastel drawings in which I would remain with the same figure for an entire session.

Something happens when you look at the same thing for that long.

The categories you begin with become less useful.

Skin stops being a single color. Greens, violets, reds, yellows, and reflected colors begin appearing across the body. Shadows contain color. Edges soften and sharpen. Areas that initially seemed insignificant begin demanding attention.

One drawing from that year has remained particularly vivid in my memory: a seated male figure observed during a long pose. As the session continued, the subtle colors within his skin seemed to gradually reveal themselves.

I wasn't thinking about mindfulness.

I was learning to draw.

But I was experiencing something that has become fundamental to my work now:

duration changes perception.

Sustained attention reveals information that a glance does not.

When the Detail Became the Composition

After a year at FIT, the daily commute from Long Island became unsustainable and I transferred to SUNY Purchase. I continued drawing from life, but I also began studying oil painting.

I struggled with it.

Drawing made sense to me. Paint did not. Solvents, mediums, canvas, and the physical behavior of oil paint were unfamiliar. I could see what I wanted to make, but controlling the material was another matter.

Our assignments often involved ordinary objects. We painted bananas, hats, cloth, and white objects. In one exercise, we enlarged popcorn kernels onto four-foot canvases.

One of the restrictions in a painting class was that we weren't supposed to use black. As I remember it, the intention was to force us to mix color and discover what existed within light and shadow rather than immediately reaching for black to darken something.

Toward the end of a semester, Professor Jane Fine assigned us to paint hands.

The night before the work was due, I was awake in my dorm room until around two in the morning trying to figure out what to do.

Eventually I broke the rule.

I opened the black paint.

I turned most of the lights off and directed a light toward my hand. Against the darkness, I could isolate the illuminated forms. I moved my hand into different positions and looked for compositions within fingers, joints, shadows, and the spaces between them.

Suddenly painting made sense.

Perhaps the black reconnected painting to the value structure I understood from drawing. Whatever happened, the struggle with the material temporarily disappeared and the rest of the evening flowed.

The next morning Professor Fine responded positively to the paintings. She wasn't upset that I had used black. As I remember it, she told me she wished she had seen more of this from me during the semester.

For the first time, I felt some control over paint.

The paintings themselves were small. Rather than canvas, I had painted them on individual pieces of Masonite. Each contained a tightly cropped fragment of my hand surrounded by darkness. Fingers entered and disappeared beyond the edges. Anatomy occasionally gave way to shape, color, light, and shadow.

Around this same period, classmates wrote critiques of my paintings. I saved many of them.

One person noticed my "interest in singular objects."

Another, responding to the way I enlarged ordinary things, wrote that I had made it so that "the detail become the composition."

Then they wrote something that feels particularly strange to encounter now:

"The paint seems to give off a sense of how you see things, well at least how you look at objects."

I don't think I would have known what to do with that observation in 1999.

Today, it feels much more significant.

Mastering the Image

The path from those paintings to my current work was not direct.

Beginning around 2012, much of my personal practice became centered on highly rendered portraiture, drawing, and tattooing.

Likeness mattered.

Technical execution mattered.

I became interested in how convincingly I could describe a face, a texture, or a surface. Some works became increasingly elaborate, combining multiple portraits within a single composition in ways that sometimes resembled illustrated movie posters.

In many ways, I spent those years pursuing the thing I had been oriented toward since I was young: the ability to make a convincing image.

That period was important.

The observational discipline never disappeared. If anything, it became more technically refined.

But the purpose of looking was often directed toward execution.

Could I capture the likeness?

Could I render the surface?

Could I make the image convincing?

By 2022, I had spent roughly a decade answering those questions.

Then my life changed.

A Rupture

In September 2022, my mother experienced a serious medical emergency.

It would be too simple to say that this event caused the work that followed. Art and life do not develop according to such clean equations.

But it marked a rupture in my life and in the trajectory of my practice.

Questions about time, presence, family, and what mattered to me became harder to keep separate from the act of making.

At roughly the same period, I was engaged in graduate study in art history.

Ideas I had encountered when I was younger—particularly ideas surrounding Modernism, reduction, abstraction, and the questioning of representation—began to interest me differently.

My writing from 2023 records that change.

I found myself thinking about what could be removed from an image while allowing something essential to remain.

I questioned whether technical mastery and illusionism were enough as destinations.

I wrote about wanting the work to become more experimental and exploratory.

This wasn't a rejection of representation.

I had simply begun asking what representation could do beyond demonstrating the ability to represent.

At the same time, my relationship to making was changing.

Art began to feel less connected to producing a finished object capable of generating a reaction and more connected to presence, process, attention, and the experience of making itself.

The question was no longer only What can I make?

Increasingly, it was What happens while I am looking?

Looking Backward

Then I began looking backward.

In January 2024, I revisited the critiques from my college painting classes.

I noticed comments about singular objects, composition, and the space surrounding them. I reflected on my longstanding need for what I described as "air" around things.

That space had never felt empty to me.

It had energy.

The realization connected unexpectedly with things I had learned much earlier: Mrs. Fuller's lessons about negative space, my tendency to crop aggressively, the long observational sessions at FIT, the small Masonite paintings, and habits of arranging objects and information spatially that had persisted throughout my life.

These weren't pieces of a project waiting patiently for me to discover them.

They belonged to different moments and different concerns.

But I was beginning to see relationships among them.

On January 26, 2024, I wrote:

"Eureka, I've struck gold. I believe I have found the format and language for the next iteration of my work."

I initially called the experiments Context Blocks.

Context Blocks

The first structure was relatively simple.

I painted individual images on separate pieces of reclaimed wood.

Each block might contain a recognizable object, portrait, or symbol. The blocks could be arranged in different configurations, allowing their relationships to change.

A thing could remain itself while its context shifted.

Move one block beside another and a narrative might appear.

Separate them and the relationship disappeared.

Rearrange the composition and another interpretation became possible.

I became interested in impermanence, flux, interaction, and the tension created between things according to their proximity.

At this stage, the individual images generally remained whole.

The primary question existed between them.

What happens when the same images occupy different relationships?

This was the first generation of what would become Alternate Sides.

But the structure soon changed.

Breaking the Image

With Self, the first full execution of the next iteration of the project, the question turned inward.

Instead of placing separate complete images onto individual blocks, I took a single observed image and distributed it across many blocks.

An eye occupied one.

An ear another.

The mouth, nose, forehead, and other portions of the face became individual painted objects.

The image itself had been broken apart.

When I made Self, I was consciously aware of the connection to the small hand paintings from college.

Those paintings had also isolated pieces of the body on small, rigid surfaces against darkness.

But there was an important difference.

In the hand paintings, fragmentation happened within the image.

In Alternate Sides, the painting itself had become fragmented.

More than twenty years after a classmate wrote that I had made "the detail become the composition," the details had become the physical objects from which the composition was constructed.

And something else happened as a result.

Recognition slowed down.

Before Recognition Settles

A highly rendered portrait normally offers the viewer a relatively direct path toward recognition.

You see a face.

You recognize a person.

The illusion succeeds.

But once the face is divided, separated, and displaced, recognition becomes less stable.

An eye can temporarily become a patch of color.

Skin can become texture.

A painted fragment can become an object.

The interval between two pieces can become as visually active as the painted forms surrounding it.

The viewer has to negotiate between part and whole.

I have described aspects of this project through fragmentation, decontextualization, modularity, reconfiguration, and mindfulness. All of those remain relevant, but I increasingly understand them as strategies rather than destinations.

They create conditions.

The question underneath them has become:

Can the formal construction of an artwork produce conditions for sustained looking?

The work cannot force anyone to look.

Nor can I guarantee that someone standing before it will have a mindful experience.

But I can interfere with the speed at which an image is consumed.

I can interrupt recognition.

I can crop.

I can separate.

I can remove something from its expected context.

I can make absence active.

I can control how much information exists within an individual fragment.

I can allow something recognizable to oscillate between what we know it to be and the color, shape, surface, light, and material from which that recognition is constructed.

The interruption is not the destination.

It creates the possibility of attention.

What the Blocks Are For

This realization has changed the way I understand Alternate Sides.

The modularity of the blocks was once much closer to the center of the project. The ability to rearrange them, change their relationships, and create alternate configurations was fundamental to its original conception and to its name.

It remains important.

But I no longer think the blocks themselves are the subject of the investigation.

They are one of the formal means through which the investigation takes place.

Some works contain relatively resolved images. Individual blocks may hold recognizable objects or substantial visual information. These works can lean toward memory, narrative, family, culture, or associations created between things.

Other works distribute a single image so completely across the blocks that the fragments become difficult to understand independently. These works lean more toward decontextualization and the movement between fragment and whole.

Others exist somewhere between those conditions.

What interests me increasingly is how the amount and organization of visual information changes the encounter.

How much information must remain before we name something?

What happens immediately before we do?

And once we recognize it, can we return to seeing its parts?

Watching the Work Being Seen

A recent exhibition has made some of these questions more visible to me.

The exhibition centers on Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and includes a majority of Latino artists, with a strong Puerto Rican presence. Much of its framing draws upon neighborhood memory and nostalgia—street games, open fire hydrants, familiar foods, music, and memories of an older New York.

Watching people encounter my work in this setting has been revealing.

Viewers often gravitate toward works containing images, objects, or references they recognize immediately. A familiar thing can activate cultural or personal memory almost instantaneously.

That connection can be powerful.

But I have also become aware that this is a different mode of looking from the one produced by some of the more fragmented works.

One begins with recognition.

The other may begin by delaying it.

This has helped clarify that I am not interested in making work "about mindfulness" in the sense of illustrating or prescribing a mindful experience.

I am interested in whether the construction of an artwork can affect the conditions under which looking occurs.

The work cannot force someone to pay attention. A viewer can always glance and move on.

But formal decisions can complicate immediate recognition. They can create uncertainty. They can ask the eye to travel between fragments, intervals, materials, and the larger image. They can create a reason to look again.

The work can interrupt recognition in order to make sustained perception possible.

Constructing an Encounter

Looking at the development of the project this way has also changed how I understand the role of making within it.

The artwork does not begin with the block.

It begins with observation.

Before something is painted, fragmented, or arranged, I have already made decisions about where to direct my attention.

What deserves to be looked at?

What portion matters?

What should remain?

What can disappear?

Where does one thing end and another begin?

These questions are not entirely new to me.

Composition taught me that I could control the frame.

Negative space taught me that what appears absent can participate in constructing what is present.

Sustained drawing taught me that prolonged attention reveals information.

Years of portraiture taught me how to construct convincing representations.

Fragmentation taught me that recognition can be disrupted.

Arrangement taught me that relationships between things can change their meaning.

The current work brings these ways of thinking together.

Observation is followed by selection.

Selection becomes cropping, fragmentation, or isolation.

Fragments are arranged in relation to one another.

Intervals are introduced.

Materials carry their own information.

And finally the work is presented to someone else.

I cannot transfer my experience of looking directly to the viewer.

What I can do is construct an encounter.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

The goal is not to tell someone what to see or how to feel. It is to make formal decisions that might create enough friction with habitual perception for another kind of attention to become possible.

In that sense, the art exists not only in the painted image but in the process of observation, selection, arrangement, and presentation that determines how the image is encountered.

Alternate Sides

The name Alternate Sides originally emphasized the modular nature of the work.

The blocks could move.

The composition could change.

There could always be another arrangement—another side.

That remains part of the project, but the meaning of the title has expanded as the work has developed.

An alternate side can also suggest another way of seeing.

A face can be a person and a collection of painted fragments.

A familiar object can carry memory while also becoming color, texture, shape, and surface.

A gap can be empty space and an active part of a composition.

A recognizable image can become temporarily unfamiliar when the relationships that normally hold it together are disrupted.

The project has become less exclusively about producing alternate arrangements and more about creating the possibility of an alternate encounter.

Looking backward, I can see pieces of this language scattered across decades.

A high-school teacher explaining that the empty space around an object can reveal the object itself.

A mirror dividing a self-portrait into sections.

Hours spent observing a figure until unexpected colors appeared.

A popcorn kernel enlarged until its detail became the composition.

A hand isolated against darkness.

Years spent learning to render faces convincingly.

A medical emergency that altered my relationship to time and presence.

Art history giving me language for questions I had previously encountered mostly through making.

Old critiques reminding me of things I had once known about my own work.

Blocks carrying complete images.

Then one image broken across many blocks.

None of these things individually explains Alternate Sides.

The work exists somewhere in their intersection.

I once thought my development as an artist was largely about learning how to make increasingly convincing images.

I don't think that anymore.

Technical ability still matters.

Observation matters.

Representation matters.

Memory matters.

Material matters.

But increasingly, I am interested in what happens before recognition settles in—that brief territory where an eye can still be color, a painted fragment can still be shape, a gap can still be form, and something familiar can become unfamiliar enough to deserve another look.

The goal is not simply to make looking more difficult.

It is to construct the conditions in which looking might continue.

And to discover what becomes visible when it does.