Underneath It All
#21 / 72

Fractured and on fire, the stability of modern American life rests in a fragile balance between societal innovations, crumbling systems, and individual contributions that continuously reshape our culture.

Faultlines places characters, purposeful but isolated, amongst artifacts of the often-overlooked systems in our world: mass transit, ocean platforms, and power grids – each proxies for the forces that keep society moving. These decaying, burning representations of the world’s underlying infrastructure feel so essential and familiar that they demand our devotion, yet perilous enough to question our faith. This tension between growth and destruction, order and chaos, are central to the conflicting nature of contemporary life – highlighting the underlying vulnerabilities of our dependence on a systematized world.

Each work in this series balances precarious moments of impending collapse – a symbol for the uncertainty of today’s daily existence – with undertones of resilience and transformation. These scenes are host to our modern anti-heroes – the mysterious, uncertain but central figures that exist, often in solitaire, ready to persevere amongst the inevitable wreckage.