I increasingly find the world I live in difficult to comprehend and maddening. Known facts are presented as falsehoods, science is rendered as witch craft and history lessons are deleted from history. Learning Curves was conceived and created within the space of confusion and anger while seeking escape and comfort. In the face of this I find myself turning to a the time of early childhood when things seemed simple, when solace could be found in a box of crayons.

Rulers that don’t measure, numbers that don’t add up, dots that don’t connect, and illegible language that mimic early learning lessons but collapse into nonsense. These visual elements intentionally reflect broken logic and disrupted systems. Brightly colored composition notebooks become charged objects oscillating between excitement and dread, evoking sentiments from nostalgia and innocence to anger and shame. Through inscription and erasure, I introduce concepts of silencing and judgment. Simple repetition becomes a tool of resilience, while language teeters on the edge of legibility, transforming into incomprehensible babble.

In Every Color in the Box, I revisit the iconic childhood Crayola crayon engaging in childlike play reflecting upon the joys and frustrations of early childhood. Cristal Blue uses the ubiquitous Bic ball point pen to draw a continuous scribbled line until the pen has exhausted all its ink as a meditation on tedious labor and the visible accumulation of time, effort, and depletion. Letters to My Brother speaks words that I cannot and spells out simmering thoughts in abstract gestures, thus muting and masking their tone.