Something happened when you saw this. What was it?
Black & White · 2024
Industrial Whispers
Pipe
Painted over. It became Sea Change
The industrial form made quiet — the pipe as the painting's subject, machinery in monochrome at the scale where it becomes architecture.
This painting no longer has a visible surface.
In July 2026 it became the ground for Sea Change — six feet of blue laid over it, and the canvas turned ninety degrees from the orientation it was made in. The spine and the pipe are still there, under the blue, running the wrong way for the painting above them. They are the reason that painting is a field and not a landscape.
What follows is the record of this one.
Pipe (2024) is a visual pun and a philosophical wink. This 72 x 60 inch mixed media painting from the Black and White Collection is an homage to objects and ideas — specifically, the tension between what we see and what we know. Inspired by Magritte’s famous “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” my Pipe is both a reference and a rupture.
The central form — vaguely tubular, curved, incomplete — hovers against a distressed monochrome background. Made from black acrylic, charcoal, and matte gray sand textures, the surface crackles with quiet tension. The pipe is not clearly drawn. It is implied, interrupted, resisting definition.
I created this piece while reflecting on semiotics — how symbols acquire power, and how quickly they slip. The pipe here isn’t about smoking. It’s about meaning, memory, and the body — how we construct and undo understanding.
This work echoes the conceptual spirit of Marcel Broodthaers and the minimal unease of Robert Morris. It doesn’t resolve. It provokes.
Pipe doesn’t ask if it is or isn’t. It asks: why do we keep asking?
Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.
The space it needs
- Wall
- At least 8 ft wide
- Ceiling
- 9 ft or more
- Light
- Any lighting — monochrome palette is lighting-agnostic
- Daylight
- Near black and tarnished silver do not drift with the sun, so it is at home near glass. The heavily worked surface rewards side light, which raises every ridge of the pipe into relief.
Lives best in
Office 5/5
A score of 5: Industrial Whispers: Pipe is exactly scaled for a private office's anchor wall, and its theme of undoing fixed meaning rewards the sustained, solitary attention that a working day permits.
Boardroom 5/5
A score of 5: the stripped palette of tarnished silver and near-black reads as precision rather than decoration, and the ruptured pipe symbol, construct turned question, gives executives something specific to think against during long deliberations.
Details
- Size
- 5 × 6 ft (W × H)
- Medium
- Acrylic on canvas
- Year
- 2024
- Collection
- Black & White
- Palette
- Tarnished Silver · Near Black · Epoxy Resin
- Weight
- About 45 lb
- Painted over
- It became Sea Change
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Sheaf
- Texture5
- Form4
- Colour range2
- Palette4.2
- Contrast4
- Abstraction Quotient2
