Personal Work is a section dedicated to my own artistic works past and present.
Book of Shadows was an exhibition I created in 2012 for Young Art, a now sadly defunct gallery in Los Angeles. Referencing the concept of a grimoire, or witch’s book of spells, the show was based around a series of texts displayed on the gallery walls in adhesive vinyl lettering. At the time, I was writing in my spare moments on my commute to my day job and at home late at night. The short pieces in this show present small details of daily life as a portal to intensity in the style of Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
The concept of the exhibition as book, or vice versa, was inspired by certain works I’d absorbed in the preceding years: Bernadette Corporation’s The Complete Poem and Reena Spaulings, and Josef Strau’s 18INIQUITIES in particular. I was also interested in links between poetry and the occult: writing as a scrying method and ingress to accursed realms. In titling Book of Shadows, I wanted to connect to traditions of transgressive literature and art, as well as the overlaps between symbolism and hermeticism.
However loose those links may have been at the time, it’s interesting to see how I’ve grown to embody many of these themes as an artist in the decade since I created these pieces. The writing feels immature to me now, the product of a different mind than the one I have currently, but it represents one of myriad significant steps on the slow, crooked path to where I am today.
