Done Being Cool is not a midlife crisis show—it’s the opposite. It’s about arriving at a place where I no longer feel the need to chase the thing I once thought was important. I’m not looking back with regret or longing. I’m looking at where I am now, how I’ve changed, and how that shows up in the work. This show is me meditating on getting older—on patience, precision, and letting go of old habits that don’t serve me anymore.

For more than a decade, I’ve worked with plywood, cutting and constructing surfaces that often felt deliberately raw—messy edges, smeared glue, clamps digging into wet paint. There was a real joy in that haphazardness, in letting the work accumulate scars in the process of becoming. But something shifted. I still build with my hands, still use the same tools, but I’m thinking more about preservation than destruction. Now I want to keep things intact, to protect the moment I first lay down a mark or a shape. The work has gotten more buttoned up—less about chaos, more about clarity.

The edges are smoother now. The gestures are more intentional. I still love the physicality of the material, but I’m treating it with a different kind of care. Where I once felt drawn to distress, I now feel compelled to finish. And yet, I’m still pushing paint into paint, still thinking about the roots of abstraction—about the emotional charge of gesture and surface. There’s a new kind of tension here between construction and painting, between the rigid and the fluid.

This show is about embracing a quieter confidence. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I’m not trying to be clever. I’m trying to be honest about where I’m at—technically, emotionally, and philosophically. There’s a responsibility in that. A kind of stewardship over my own practice. I’ve had to slow down. Be more patient. Take myself a little less seriously, but also take the work more seriously.