No Adjerlies in this Room sits in a shift toward more brushwork-driven painting. The surface is built through direct, responsive marks rather than layered collage or dense pattern. There’s still structure here, but it’s looser, more open. Forms loop, break, and re-form across the surface, creating a field that feels active without being locked in. Some areas get dense and busy, others open up and let things breathe. It feels like something that’s still in motion.
I keep coming back to these oblong, enclosed shapes. I can’t really not see them as cells—contained units that are also porous, interacting with what’s around them. In this painting they drift, cluster, overlap, and occasionally push up against each other. There’s a sense of low-level activity—growth, circulation, maybe just things coexisting in the same space. Depending on how you look at it, they can feel like structure or like intrusion. I’m not interested in deciding which. The tension between those readings is part of what keeps it alive.
My just-turned-three-year-old has started talking about “adjerlies,” which are keeping him up at night. It’s his word for monsters. His imagination has come online and is filling the dark with things that go bump. I was on FaceTime with my partner and the boys in the studio early one morning while they were getting breakfast, and that’s when I first heard about these “adjerlies.” During that call, they came up with a plan to put signs on his bedroom door that said “No Adjerlies in this Room.” I was taking photos of this painting—still unnamed—while all this was happening, and the phrase stuck with me.
It felt like a way into the painting, even though the painting wasn’t made to illustrate that moment. There’s something about naming something you can’t see, drawing a boundary around it, trying to keep it out. But the painting doesn’t really cooperate with that idea. The forms are already in there. They’re not clearly good or bad—they’re just present, moving, interacting. It ends up feeling less like a system of exclusion and more like a system of coexistence. Everything is already part of the same environment, whether you like it or not.
