Where’s Jeffrey?

Acrylic paint on loose canvas

6’h x 20’w

2024

This painting shows a crowd of people from my life, all wearing various types of costumes, existing in a Möbius strip landscape. It is reminiscent of teeming picture books like Where’s Waldo, but I (Jeffrey) am not in the painting. It’s meant to speak to the idea that we are made up of the people we know in life, but that we only understand parts and pieces of those individuals. The answer to “Where’s Jeffrey?” is that Jeffrey is the painting itself. 

I made this work last winter in Provincetown, MA during my 7 month residency at the Fine Arts Work Center. The canvas filled my largest wall, and the landscape of the painting mimicked the land I was standing on, which was the form of a spiral. I wanted to create a window into a world that somehow captures the entirety of all time and place. There is a sunset and moonrise, the sky and the sea are one and the same, and the land turns upside against the righthand side.

This detail shows some of the “characters” in the painting. I chose each person/friend/family member, at that time, because they simply entered my mind in one way or another. So I’d search the internet for images of them in costumes or just ask them for a picture. Each costumed character called to parts of myself and moments from my life, while holding a familiarity allowing others to see their lives through it as well. Certain outfits called to points across time that many of us have seen and brought into our own experiences, and as people walked next to the painting in order to see each little character, they experienced joy while pointing out the ones that reminded them of their own pasts.