The Settlement of Systems

Archived Series, 2007 to 2009

This series worked in the visual language of science fiction, spacecraft, architectures, cosmic environments, but the language was a vehicle, not the subject. What was being worked out, intuitively at the time and only named later, was a way of seeing space as something constructed, occupied, and settled: how ambition organizes vast territory through structure, hierarchy, and control. The science fiction imagery was simply the vocabulary available for ideas that did not yet have words. The series marks a transitional phase in the practice, bridging early systemic abstraction in Nova with the later turn toward constructed environments and landscapes. It developed through extended navigation of large-scale digital environments, where movement through built space generated the composition, the same method that runs through every later period of the work. What changed in the years since is not the method but the language for describing it. Alongside this, the studio undertook a deliberate return to oil painting at scale, using these works to test large-format execution, layered composition, and the spatial depth associated with Baroque painting. The combination of classical painterly discipline and digitally informed spatial logic produced works that stabilize expansive environments into singular, resolved images. Archived as a cohesive body, The Settlement of Systems documents the moment when virtual space and classical painting methods first converged. The ideas were present before the words were. This is where the method that defines the later work first became visible.