NOVA Series

Archived Series, 2004 to 2006

Nova is where the practice begins. In 2004 I bought my first computer and a single piece of software, reshaped a photograph of a poppy inside it, and saw an exploding star. A real source, transformed digitally, resolved by hand, with imagination supplying the leap from a small natural thing to something vast. Everything I have made since is contained in that one act. These are the first works that were fully my own. Large oils, works on paper, and the digital transformations behind them, all built from the same move: take a real form, alter it, and read the result as something larger than itself. The method arrived complete, before I had any language for it, and it never left. It is the same process that runs through every period that followed, from constructed game worlds to self-built environments. What is not here yet is the subject. Nova is pure image, a single form held at the moment of transformation, frozen and complete. There is no time in it, nothing yielding, nothing built. The concerns that would later define the work, human structure and the forces that exceed it, had not arrived. They would come in stages over the years that followed. Nova is the engine, running before it had found what it was meant to carry. That is why these works still matter. They are not a precursor to the practice. They are its origin, the first time a source was navigated, transformed, and brought to rest by hand. The how was born here. The what would take twenty years to arrive.