The Gift

In the Capitoline Museums, I found her — Bernini’s Medusa, carved around 1630, her face caught in the precise moment of transformation. Not before. Not after. The instant when what had happened to her was becoming part of who she was, the snakes already emerging, her expression holding everything at once: hurt, resolve, and the strange clarity of watching yourself change.

I stood in front of her and felt something I recognized.

The Gift is a large-scale wall installation built from materials chosen to speak to each other the way experience speaks through the body. A custom steel bow — patinated, skeletal, its legs reaching outward toward the viewer the way a mantis extends itself, drawing you in — is draped with red silk that has been hand-burnt along its edges, the fabric flowing from the metal armature, still rich in color even as it frays. What remains is the evidence — of what was taken, and what endured.

At the center of the bow, hanging free of restraints, is a small antique Italian oval frame — and inside it, the close-up encounter with Medusa. She is the medallion of the exchange, the translator suspended between the structure and the viewer, between the artist and anyone who has ever given up something they did not choose to. She is why the bow exists. She is what the bow carries.

The Gift is about what we have left to offer after life has changed us. It is about the beauty and the strength that remain in understanding where we have come from and what has shaped us — not despite the pain, but through it and because of it.

This is one of the two most personal works in Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.