2023
painting: acrylic on wood panels and shapes
as exhibited at Museum of Craft and Design

Legendary Bay Area rapper E-40 has a song called Choices (Yup); in it, he posits that everyone has choices to make, and asks a series of questions that are answered “Yup” or “Nope”. Much of the song is the usual braggadocio, but it is fantastic, hypnotic, and deeply Bay Area, so much so that he rewrote it as a Golden State Warriors anthem , too.

For an exhibition on crafting a Bay Area life, I chose to navigate my own choices to stay or leave as a Bay Area native. This diptych’s composition is based on a stylized basketball court layout as I’ve considered whether I’m to remain the home team or the away team. I choose home, but being away is professionally necessary to play the game, too.

Ever since the terrible “Orange Day” of wildfire smoke in 2020, I have employed the complementary colors of blue and orange in certain projects. When you mix two complements, you get a range of more neutral shades: these shades are the fog and mist which move across this composition as well. Fog is such an enduring fact of life in San Francisco. It’s not easy to make clean “yup/nope” choices here in the Bay Area: decisions can be shrouded in fog, and held in a state of in-between-ness.