The installation Reverse Alchemy was intended as a tribute to the difficult lives, unseen labor and rich immigrant history of New York's Lower East Side. 

Taking Robert Ryman's white-on-white paintings as inspiration, I was able to go one step further towards minimalism — to create paintings made only of paint (without the usual canvas/panel/substrate). These were recontextualized: hung with clothespins on a laundry line to allow narratives of immigration, displacement, unseen labor, and questions of value and function in art and life to emerge and intersect in unexpected ways.

For example, this fabricated laundry channels social realist photographs by Jacob Riis and Berenice Abbot of tenement life during the Great Migration at the turn of the the 20th Century; moths (memento mori) under floorboards from the garment industry; the rich history of alchemy and art; the feminine labor of laundry; and the decorative arts tradition. 

Hung so as to be viewed from both sides, it is difficult to determine which side is recto and which is verso in these double-sided laundry rags/paint rags/paint skins. I developed hybrid techniques inspired by the decorative arts (reverse painting/verre eglomise, marbling and stenciling) for one side of the rags, and blended fine art modes (abstraction, expressionism, minimalism, painterly illusionism) for the other side of each rag.

Additionaly, a programmed light cycle creates a disorienting, simulated, and compressed day/night loop. This fourth dimension allows for a transcendant psychedelic space in which UV sensitive pigments create a similacrum of the night-time glow of moths and fireflies.