Ghosts in 2020-2023

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"When you cut into the present the future leaks out," wrote William S. Burroughs. What happens when you cut into the past?

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This work is inspired by what may be the earliest American cut-and-paste project: Jefferson’s Bible. Late in life and in secret, Thomas Jefferson took a knife to the New Testament. He cut and pasted a version that kept only the rational and plausible stories, leaving out what he considered irrational: the miracles, the visions, Jesus rising from the dead. The marginal stories he removed are the ones I feel closest to. These works pay homage to the fragments left on his cutting-room floor, reimagined as a founding text that still shapes the American landscape.

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The paintings are translated from Untitled Times, my 252-inch scroll of the cut-up New York Times. I worked on each section of the scroll for months, sometimes years, until it made sense or fell apart. Then I scanned the newsprint and translated it, section by section, into CMYK silkscreen paintings, scaled to the dimensions of my body: a concrete dialogue with a mutable present and an imagined past. The process lets me engage, physically and conceptually, with a span of time much longer than my own lifetime. The paintings take their titles from sections of the scroll; the assemblages take theirs from passages Jefferson cut out of his Bible.

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Exhibited: Ghosts in, solo exhibition, Ulterior Gallery, New York, 2023; Recurrent, Ulterior Gallery, New York, 2022. Interviewed in BOMB, September 20, 2023. [Link]  Featured in Harper’s Magazine, October 2026. [Link]

Photos: Jason Mandella​

See also: Untitled Times. [Link]​