The Colony
The Colony
The Colony is an ongoing cycle of twelve 62" x 44" figurative oil paintings that constructs a painted world inhabited by a recurring cast of characters. As they move from painting to painting, their roles, relationships, and identities continually shift. At times, they appear as different people; at others, as different versions of the same person. They move through cycles of conflict, humor, loss, celebration, and transformation, reflecting the contradictions that shape our lives.
The series is rooted in my longstanding interest in American culture and the ways personal experience becomes entangled with collective stories. As Greil Marcus has written, “America is the life’s work of American artists.” In The Colony, American popular culture, literature, music, personal memory, Western painting, and everyday experience intersect, allowing familiar figures, symbols, and stories to reappear in new contexts.
The series is deeply influenced by Giotto's Renaissance fresco cycles, where recurring figures and individual scenes accumulate into a larger narrative. I am equally drawn to the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose monumental cycles weave individual scenes into broader narratives of Mexican history, identity, and society. The Colony adapts these traditions to a contemporary, deeply personal world.
Intertextuality is central to the series. Meaning accumulates from one painting to the next as viewers discover connections, repetitions, and contradictions across the cycle. Rather than telling a single story, The Colony creates a world where memory and imagination overlap, and where every return offers another way of seeing the people we are, the people we were, and the people we might become.