Artist Talk at the Daura Museum of Art

Artist talk Daura


Good evening, and thank you all for being here at the Daura Museum of Art. It really means a great deal to share this work with you in person.


This exhibition, centers on a simple but persistent question: what happens in the space between what we see and what we understand?


Across these paintings, you’ll encounter familiar objects forms that might feel recognizable at first but they exist within quiet, often suspended spaces. These environments are intentionally restrained. They’re not meant to dictate meaning, but to slow us down. To create a moment where looking becomes something more deliberate.


I love the term quiet space, it makes me think of reverent spaces or holy spaces, moments that allow for pause and reflection, these painting exist as gateways to visual reverence and quietness. They are meditative and ask the viewer so pause and allow a moment of psychological stillness. 


I often think of these works as a kind of aesthetic Rorschach test. Not in a clinical sense, but in the way that meaning doesn’t arrive fully formed. Instead, it emerges through your engagement. Your associations, your memories, your internal logic these are not secondary to the work, they complete it.


That idea is central for me: the viewer is not passive. You are an active participant. The paintings don’t resolve without you.


While the imagery is rooted in my own experience my personal history, my internal narratives and metaphors have been reshaped, even obscured at times. Not to hide meaning, but to open it. To create space where multiple interpretations can coexist. I’m less interested in delivering a fixed message than I am in setting up a condition for dialogue.


Ambiguity, in this sense, isn’t confusion it’s a bridge. It’s what allows the work to move beyond my singular perspective and become something shared. 


There’s also a kind of quiet tension I’m pursuing between clarity and uncertainty, between object and symbol, between presence and absence. I want the work to hover in that space, where recognition and doubt exist at the same time.


Ultimately, these paintings are an invitation. An invitation to look longer, to question your first impressions, and to consider how meaning is constructed—not just in art, but in perception more broadly.


What do we bring with us when we look? 


I also want to address the title of this show, Sisyphus. If you’re unfamiliar, In Greek mythology Sisyphus is a king condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity only to have it roll back down each time he nears the top of the hill. His struggle repeats endlessly and his punishment is eternal.


In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus suggests that meaning doesn’t come from some higher external space, but from how we engage with existence itself. As humans, we crave clarity, structure, and purpose, yet the universe offers us cold indifference. This tension creates what Camus calls the absurd.


Rather than escaping that condition, Camus argues that we should accept it and continue anyway. Through that acceptance, we unlock freedom. We begin to create meaning through our actions, our attention, and our experience of the present moment.


This idea has a strong parallel with perceptual painting. At its core, it’s about lucidity and seeing clearly, without illusion and elevating the overlooked through giving it time and patience. Ordinary objects, quiet spaces, and familiar forms are lifted out of invisibility and reconsidered as sites of meaning and beauty.


There’s a feeling today that our labor is repetitive, even meaningless that we’re all pushing some version of that same boulder.


I heard someone relate the idea of how amazing it is to be exhausted doing the thing you begged the universe for the ability to do. Creating work is that boulder that you carry, Camus never says the boulders weight is lifted because Sisyphus’s finds meaning in his work, the burden remains, as it does with painting and creating, every work is a boulder placed at the bottom of the hill. Each one carries the struggle and the despair, the trials and the pain, but as we work through the process we see a glimmer of meaning, a small splinter of duty, or of hope. That maybe this time it will remain at the top, the irony of the entire situation is that as every artist in this room knows, we also hope that the boulder finds its way back to the base of the hill so we can create again, and in that we see a true understanding of the myth of sisyphus. 


What Camus offers, and what I’m interested in discovering through painting, is the idea that meaning is not found beyond the struggle, but within it. The act of looking, of engaging, of paying attention this is where meaning emerges.


One of the core principles I emphasize in my classes is that when you truly observe and engage with the world, it becomes impossible to deny the depth of meaning and beauty within it. To borrow from Ralph Ammar: you make the world a beautiful place by paying attention. This has become one of the foundations of my entire art practice and is being showcased here tonight in the Museum.


If you are bored and want to ignore all the other things I’ve said, I would love for you to wake up for this one. 


If you’re willing to step outside your own immediate perception, even briefly, you will begin to see that same struggle and that same search for meaning in everyone you have the pleasure of meeting. And within that, there is something undeniably profound, a solidarity with every other human being you exist with. Once you are enlightened to that you will be reminded that the absurdity of existence doesn’t disappear, but it becomes something we all get to live with, and even embrace.
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And in that acceptance, we begin to truly see and to truly live.

Thank you for spending time with the work, and I hope it continues to unfold for you.