LABOR brings together a new series of paintings that draw on images from fashion, pop culture, and the beauty industry. Fragments of faces, denim, and self-maintenance rituals point toward systems of image circulation and consumption — filtered through a lens of performance and artifice.

Like an accidental Instagram scroll, what does Ariana Grande, an eye-makeup tutorial, and Empress Elisabeth have in common? Perhaps only what we, as viewers, choose to give them. In LABOR, physical and aesthetic work intertwine symbolically and poetically, reflecting how the performance of femininity is a complex constellation of compliance and resistance — of repetition, devotion, fatigue, and eventual exhaustion.

“I dress for the image,” Marlene Dietrich famously declared. Through surface and material, LABOR traces the politics of appearance: how images are never neutral, how ideals of beauty are shaped by sociopolitical contexts where desire, consumption, and aspiration blur into one another.

Painting becomes both server and counterpart: What does it mean to extract images from an infinite digital archive and give them poetic materiality? Perhaps simply to look — to remove them from their context and take a moment to reflect on the ritual you performed this morning.

Between desire and exhaustion, image and body, LABOR reveals beauty as something made: a practice, a performance, and ultimately, a form of work.