Open Projection Space is a meditation on symbols and the unconscious: the meanings we assign to a circle, a doorway, a color, without knowing why. Assembled across four years of painting (2020—2024), the book arrived in the aftermath of enormous personal loss and transformation: my father's death, a divorce, coming out, and a collective cultural reckoning with what it means to be human in the age of algorithmic everything.

The book doesn't tell my story. It opens a space and hands you the language. If you look at the work and find yourself telling your own story, that's the point. We're drawing from the same Jungian well.

The first piece had a simple, radical constraint: tell a story in four parts with no frames, no pages, no explicit narrative. Just paint. The subject was whatever the shadow work brought up: no prompts, no brief, no audience. The emotion went directly into the image.

From there, the making became compulsive. 2020 was an anxious, distraught year by anyone's measure, and these paintings absorbed it. There was no plan for a book. There was just the need to be in the work.

The symbolic vocabulary emerged without being consciously designed. It showed up in retrospect, visible only once there was enough of it to see.

The work began digitally and expanded into the sketchbook: analog studies, gesture drawings, thumbnail explorations that fed back into the digital pieces. The same process used in physical media, running underneath every image.

Somewhere in the middle of the making, the work started talking back.

Showing pieces one at a time to friends and intimates (in process, without comment), they found stories I hadn't consciously placed there. Shamans. Rituals. Cults. Collective ceremonies nobody told them to look for. They connected images across pieces I hadn't linked myself, and each conversation made me feel more connected to the people I love than I had in years.

This is when my thesis became real rather than theoretical: art communicates beyond what the artist is conscious of. The symbols were legible because we share them. They live in all of us.

The work began appearing in zines (shout out to Soft World, Billy Branca & Substrate, Cort Hartle): one piece at a time finding its public. But a zine is a moment. I wanted a storybook. Something someone could return to, reread, reinterpret across years of their own life.

That's when Open Projection Space became a book.

The galleys were produced at SimplePrints: a 12×12" gallery book format, paper chosen for maximum durability, weight, and color vibrancy. Large enough to sit with. Built to last.

Sequencing was collaborative from the start: shared galley drafts, feedback from friends, the emotional and narrative logic assembled among us the same way the paintings themselves communicate: through shared interpretation. The structure of the book proved the thesis of the book.

There is no text. No captions, no artist statement embedded in the pages. An early instinct toward including poetry keeps returning, but something stops it: adding my words to the ground of the images would narrow the space a viewer needs to generate their own story. The purity of that open space is the whole point.

Currently, two copies exist. My artist proof has been cut apart: used as raw material for collages, the images migrating into new work. My mother's copy has been left with her; friends have added squigglebirds in the white space of the spreads. Both copies have been written on, cut, drawn over, made communal. The book was never meant to be preserved behind glass.

Open Projection Space taught me that the people looking are equal contributors to what my work means. I had an internal symbolic vocabulary; I shared it without explanation and watched people find their own true stories in it. That felt like a magic trick.

Meaning isn't something an artist defines and a viewer receives. It's something assembled together, in the space between the image and the person looking at it. The book exists because a community of friends showed me that: not as a theory, but as lived experience, conversation by conversation.

Ultimately, I think (Capital A)rt is truly made in collaboration.

So... show those okay paintings.