This 2025 exhibition includes works that use the squirrel character as a comic mechanism through which to process life at the borders of the built and natural world. I have been painting and drawings squirrels since 2010. This series of Squirrel works began to fully develop when I moved to New York City in 2012. I was young, energetic, and nervous, trying to carve out a path that felt natural. I noticed squirrels doing something similar. Squirrels built smaller happier worlds that nestled within the bigger scarier world, bouncing between known and unknown, safe and dangerous, and mostly succeeding. Compared to other species, who had less charming strategies for existing in the city, squirrels navigated their world with a sunny disposition. Hurricane Sandy hit the city a few months after I arrived. In its aftermath, I remember looking to the squirrels for guidance. In my work, the squirrel as a symbol has taken shape in different ways—as a protector, a watcher, a gargoyle, a friend, a God, a scapegoat. And these different relationships to the animal have resolved into different kinds and styles of artworks.
In 2015 I made an artist book called SQWORLD, which brought together drawings, paintings, images, and text in the form of a children’s story. I took the cover photo while walking in Long Island City, when I saw a squirrel that looked as if it was praying to a crumbling statue of the Virgin Mary. Or maybe Mary was praying to the squirrel. The opening line of the book is sourced from a GZA song called “Cold World,” which itself sourced the line from the 1980 Japanese film “Shogun Assassin” :
“I had a bad dream”
“Don’t be afraid, bad dreams are only dreams”
“What a time you chose to be born”
Wu Tang built a metaphysical world based on the code of the Samurai that allowed them to move through New York City in the 1980s; in SQWORLD, I built a world of the squirrel that allowed me to move through the New York City of the 2010s. We both chose the quote for the same reason—it gives us agency over the time and place of our own birth and circumstance in a way that is both impossible and empowering. I have long wondered about where these paintings, these characters, would want to exist. What would be an appropriate venue to exhibit these works? Where could they be present but not fully exposed? When I saw this abandoned office space in an industrial area of Baltimore, across from a city dump, I knew I was there. For decades, the building had housed a local commercial painting company. When the company closed down, the building was left unchanged, like a time capsule from the 1970’s, 80s, and 90s. This was a place that wouldn’t mind being inhabited by squirrels.
Showing paintings in an abandoned commercial painting business speaks to some of the forced distinctions that the art world often makes when establishing imaginary borders that dictate value, importance, and style. These Squirrel works are also about questioning these kinds of distinctions through humor and irony. While I have made many bodies of work over the years, this subject is one I enjoy revisiting, taking relief from the self-imposed constraint of squeezing meaning through a squirrel-shaped sieve.
