Three Kings Exit Henri's Jungle (after Rousseau)

The “Beguile” series explores “nature.” But what appears natural is structured by power— competition, extraction, survival, and human intervention. Drawing on the flattened space, compressed scale, and constructed wildernesses of Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings, I build fantastical collage-based environments inhabited by bees, giant insect-like backhoes, nimble flying mayflies, albino fireflies, villainous ants, and other creatures both real and imagined. These staged ecosystems function as sites of contradiction, where industry and ecology coexist uneasily, and where invention and destruction are visually intertwined. The precise binary between natural and artificial gives way to the ambiguity of overlapping systems of control, adaptation, and consequence.