May 2nd thru May 24th, 2026

In 2018, in Napoli with my family at the Archeological museum, I was bowled over by the friezes from Pompeii. At the time I was wrestling with questions of how to make an analog presentation of simultaneity and the museum’s installation of these fragmentary works presented a deep logic. The installations rebuild the original proximity of the painted scenes and convey a strong idea of the values in the imagery within the living space of the Romans, including depictions of landscapes, artful piles of bread and fruit, mythic stories, and bawdy satyrs. The style of the painting, the visible layers of the sketches, and the sense of humor, felt incredibly relevant and contemporary.

During that trip, we stayed in another family’s apartment in Vomero where there was a collection of leather-bound editions of renowned comics that I paged through repeatedly with my daughter. The Peanuts crew, a villainous doctor crashing sports cars, Asterix & the Picts, and german cowboys, all translated to Italian, which neither of us read, and printed in black & white, bringing their distinct lines and landscapes into high relief.

The frames of the comics and friezes were clearly and inextricably linked. Diabolical. Both graphic languages picture idiosyncratic paths of thinking with a particular clarity, presenting physical objects that sit in the same plane as the intangible. Running into these same comics again & again in children’s sections of different libraries, their role in a troubling pedagogy clicked for me.

For years I ran with the idea of mingling classic and illustrational imagery, in iterations of collections of drawings and prints, working toward the succinct statement of those installations. The art historic arc from the friezes to the comics, and the pervasive narratives woven through haunted me. The question stayed with me, how to counter the easy confidence these graphics exude?