How are traditional genres from art history being transformed through contemporary artistic production, and how will they, in turn, enter art history under the lens of the 21st century? This piece is my interpretation of the Still Life genre, specifically the Vanitas, in which “reminders of death” were used to highlight the transience of life.

In the past, symbols like skulls, mirrors, and instruments of knowledge were often used in this genre to convey a sense of impermanence, as well as the vanity of human existence. The Latin phrase Memento mori—meaning “Remember that you will die”—was frequently included in such works.

In this piece, I use lava rock—magma that has risen from the depths of the Earth, just like us, and of which we will once again be a part when this temporary human life has ended. The gold within the stone represents vanity.

In the pieces of this series, vanity is portrayed in various ways, depending on the particular form of the rock—ranging from prominent areas to capriciously sinuous threads that are lost and diluted, just as in our own fleeting lives.

In 2024, the artist Ryan Sandison Montgomery invited me to contribute a destroyed piece of art to an installation he presented at the Texas Biennial in Houston, where he addressed the ongoing tragedy in Gaza—an effort to create a space for grief, solidarity, and to confront, as he put it, “the limits of artistic production in the face of atrocity.”

Engaging with this framework, I chose to dismantle one of my own works from the Memento Mori series, treating the act of destruction not only as a response to atrocity and shared complicity, but also as a meditation on the transformation of our physical presence in the world. 

The piece, titled White heat, is a video showing the flames of a deep, growing fire—a fire that intensifies as a passage toward transformation. The work became a gesture of sacrifice and remembrance, acknowledging both human loss and the boundaries of creation itself.