Stay on your guard, Joe

Anyone who dismisses you

Dismiss them promptly, 

Permanently, and

Without recollection

Don’t compromise on what matters to you

Keep active

Do not cultivate the uninterested

Do not accommodate them

Keep away from them

Do not work for them

or, with them 

Don’t get lost

I picture the Earth 

think i     n          g

turning over

being,

absence,

loss

Years on 

I carry,

wherever I go,

Your echo

Ayngel emerged from a chance encounter at a gas-station in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. 

This body of work investigates the emotional, material, and transformative evolutions of identity and the desire for and enduring effects of human connection. Through an elliptical sequence of portraits, still-lifes, appropriated images, and diaristic texts, the work intertwines fictions considering family, labor, mental-health, and memory. In the process, timelines and identities merge, fracture, and reassemble to highlight the inherently fictive and fragmentary nature of depiction. Ayngel is an act of love, focused on the value of familial and social bonds during our contemporary era of exceeding social and political instability across the United States.