Art Matters

When: April, 2025
Where: Outlier’s Gallery,
157A First Street, #246, Jersey City, NJ

My solo exhibition, Stilled Resistance, at Outliers Gallery in Jersey City, NJ is on display through the month of April, 2025. The show features a series of still life paintings that, at first glance, might seem playful or nostalgic — familiar items like Twinkies, Lay’s Potato Chips, and Kentucky Fried Chicken rendered in vibrant detail. But beneath their glossy wrappers and bright branding, these foods served as symbolic stand-ins for the everyday person, caught in the currents of larger societal forces.

Each painting in Stilled Resistance was a meditation on the social and economic issues shaping our times. The Twinkies piece, for example, addressed The Great Replacement Theory, repurposing the iconic snack cake as a satirical but unsettling metaphor for how conspiracy rhetoric can dehumanize and distract. The bag of potato chips in Price Gouged takes on the issue of corporate price gouging, referencing how even the most mundane products reflect growing inequality and corporate overreach. Another painting featuring Kentucky Fried Chicken explored the intersections of class, cultural identity, and mass consumption.

The show invited viewers to confront these tensions through the lens of still life — a traditionally quiet genre reimagined here as a subtle but pointed form of resistance. By elevating junk food to the realm of oil painting, I aimed to draw attention to the overlooked, the discarded, and the deeply personal ways we all navigate a world shaped by profit, power, and disinformation.

When: June, 2024
Where: Outlier’s Gallery,
157A First Street, #246, Jersey City, NJ

Through June, I’m presentng my solo exhibition, Vanishing Environments, at Outliers Gallery in Jersey City, NJ. This body of work focused on the devastating impact of climate change on wildlife, specifically highlighting endangered animals whose habitats are rapidly disappearing.

Painted in an expressive, urgent style, the works were created using house paint on builder’s paper — a deliberate choice of materials meant to echo the fragility and impermanence of the natural world. Builder’s paper, often used to protect surfaces during construction or demolition, served here as both canvas and metaphor: a reminder that the world these animals depend on is quite literally being paved over.

Each painting captured a species on the brink — not as specimens, but as living presences marked by energy, emotion, and a sense of looming disappearance. From melting ice caps to vanishing forests and rising oceans, Vanishing Environments explored not only the ecological crisis but our complicity and responsibility in confronting it.