“According to Todd” is an all-illustrated chapter that depicts the climactic events of the novel through the eyes of the character Todd, a delinquent teenager confessing to a violent crime from prison through a series of kaleidoscopic drawings. The sequence is composed of three five-panel acts in which Todd’s imperfect memory and hallucinatory imagination are interwoven with elements of narratorial omniscience to create a dark, phantasmal reflection of the novel’s primary tragedy. The drawings are rendered in ink and paint marker on watercolor paper, and were developed in the summer of 2021. The originals are now part of Tess’s private collection.

Buy the book at Penguin Random House.

The reference photographs for these paintings were created by tracking various light sources within a moving frame at long shutter speeds, resulting in heavily abstracted photographic impressions that then get "photo-realistically" rendered in oil on panel. This liminal modality of representation—a sort of musical inversion of the classical trompe l'oeil—disrupts conventional understanding (in spite of its deeply conventional subject). As a result, the ideas we have about what we see become increasingly fraught by a Möbius loop of visual code-switching, probing our intuition of form, value and time out to the very edge of our visual imagination.

Within the science of light, of course, lies a similar ontological knot: not only do we observe that its nature appears to be two things at once, but the more we try to “know” or measure it in one way, the less capable we become of doing so in another.

The wondrous confusion we experience in response to these ineffable images reifies our human affair with light, provoking an instinctive desire for clarity and identification while at the very same time refusing to award these things to our grasping mind.

-2024

With a little help from the D’Addario family, luthier and physicist Tom Nania created this website in 2023 to archive some of the world’s most famous archtop guitars. By analyzing the structure of each instrument through various innovative methods from CT scans to 360º impulse-responses, Tom’s research reveals how the “signature” sound of these famous guitars varies as a result of their physical properties and design.

My role in this project is to take the raw data from this research and recompose it into a visual presentation legible to a general audience. This includes illustrating graphs, editing photos and videos, and mastering audio.