Process

Momentary collage in the Benesse House Park Lounge on Naoshima island. Postcard of Relatum-Silence by Lee Ufan, green tea wrapper, Naoshima guide fragments, Hiroshi Sugimoto table (glass over Japanese horse chestnut tree).

Process

Momentary collage in a tea room in Tokyo. Rice cracker wrapper, vintage magazines, wood table. Made to the sounds of James's latest free mix The Red Curtain, an ode to David Lynch and a shadowed slinky space where I do my best thinking.

Process

"In his book about the future (in this case, now our past), Stanislaw Lem said that from the end of the 1980s, it was shown to be a technical necessity to give the machines periods of rest during which, free from 'programming instructions,' they could fall to 'babbling' and 'random shuffling,' and, thanks to this erratic activity, regenerate their capacity... I asked myself if it might be the case that, in the creative field, we had found ourselves in a period of repose born out of technical necessity, a period from which we would all emerge more than revived. So why so much ominous chatter? Was it so infuriating to live in a time of 'babble'? Perhaps we were in a moment in which we were recovering speech." - The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas

Process

If the condo is on fire, I would grab the pouch of handwritten notes: James’s atomic specks, Mom’s balanced strokes, Dad’s whipping cursive. Their souls feel implanted in these lines, whether it's Agong’s thoughts on world religions or Mom’s directions to Ann Arbor. As penmanship gets displaced with digital tools, handwriting has become its most intriguingly expressive. No more universal Spencerian decorum; it's a free-for-all of personality, and I'm drawn to the honesty of chicken scratches. That’s why I made the Glyph series: this alphabet that connects us with people across nearly 4,000 years is in a most soulful phase. 

Process

Totality! Celestial alignments above and below. A new phase of life near my adorable parents.

Process

Behind the scenes of The Nightly News in London in 2022. We called the space the Tarkovsky Box because it was alway drippy with rain like in Stalker.

Process

“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God… This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Process

Behind the scenes of After the End at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York in 2021. James and I were miffed by the seams in the altar, so we decided to seal them with caulk and paint. The altar could potentially collapse under substantial weight, so I slithered onto it like Mission Impossible as everyone watched with bated breath. It worked out.

People often asked us how we got responses to the center of the altar. A very unfancy four-foot-long grabber tool.

Process

“Emotional granularity isn’t just about having a rich vocabulary; it’s about experiencing the world, and yourself, more precisely… According to a collection of studies, finely grained, unpleasant feelings allow people to be more agile at regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed, and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them… It gives your brain more precise tools for handling the myriad challenges that life throws at you.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett 

Process

Process

Process

In the nearby city of Turku, grids of these now-secular Swedish Advent candelabras line the windows of apartments and office buildings alike, casting a meditative and communal mood on the streets like a temple.

Process

Behind the scenes of Light the Barricades in Los Angeles in 2019. When it traveled to Charlotte, the Doubt lightbox happened to stand in the backdrop of a wedding ceremony. They covered the word.