His writing often examines how modernity’s crises disassemble and re-constitute notions of personhood. Recurring subjects of interest include techno-spirituality, post-human cosmologies, lifestyle minimalism, animism, and the digital’s relation to the afterlife. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013. He is available for bookings as a speaker, convener, mentor, and sparring partner.
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Some Recent Endeavors
Public Programs—Discrit
2018 – Current
Discrit is an art education platform promoting experimental thinking and debate in contemporary art and culture. Discrit believes in making art discourse free and accessible, supported by an equitable exchange of diverse and divergent perspectives. Since our founding in early 2018, I, with co-founder Joey Molina, have produced over twenty-five public programs, ranging from seminars, panels, screenings, and original lectures. Recent programs include lectures by Legacy Russell and manuel arturo abreu. Since Fall 2018, we have hosted our programs at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.
Lecture—Stockholm Syndrome: Acne Studios and the Prison of Luxury Minimalism
2022
This talk examines the under-theorized conventions of what we might call “minimalist architectural styling” across a range of fashion spaces that comprise the ineffable brand of Swedish fashion house Acne Studios, from the garment, the storefront, and the highly-staged, widely-circulating digital photographs of each. Through a visit to a number of Acne Studios’ storefronts and a close look at their photographic representations, a constellation of contemporary anxieties and fantasies are revealed that help us to uncover the real reasons for minimalism’s growing gravitational pull in the life of the urban culture classes. Close-looking and analysis also opens up space to lend minimalism a greatly needed definitional and explanatory update.
Lecture—Hunger: A New Vision of the Spiral Jetty
2020
“Hunger” is a new take on one of the twentieth century’s most iconic art works, Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty (1970). In a wide-ranging talk connecting topics as diverse as anorexia, Franz Kafka, ancient mysticism, and Marie Kondo, I position asceticism, or lifestyles characterized by abstinence from sensual pleasures, as a hidden backbone animating a number of highly consequential proposals for art-making and being in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The research seeks to uncover the asceticisms beneath Jetty’s unstable relation of mysticism and mud, and trace this timeless human impulse into the present. Video here.
Discrit x Montez Press Radio
2020
Curated eight original programs for Montez Press Radio, including an interview with artists Maralie Armstrong and Kai Franz, a chat about the contemporary southern gothic with artist Emma McMillan, and a conversation between Dr. André Brock and Dr. Susannah Morris on black technocultures. Archived here.
Lecture—Painting in Present Tense
2018
“Painting in Present Tense” examines the ways in which contemporary painting reflects our fraught relationship to time. The talk argues for painting’s relevance in an era whose speeds seem to outpace the “slowness” of the medium and our capacity to witness life itself. Linking such seemingly disparate subjects as Russian Orthodox icons, zombies, online avatars, the surprisingly unresolved question of what constitutes human death, metaphysical examinations of the nature of time, and the importance of “sensing slowly” in a digital world, “Painting in Present Tense” explores artistic experience in an atemporal world.
Lecture—In Excess: An Examination of Love in Three Acts
2019
What happens when humans form complex attachments to non-human actors? How do we explain the love between a person and a ghost? The love of an idea, an artifact, an image? And what, in turn, does the ghost desire? What do images want? In Excess: An Examination of Love in Three Acts consists of an interactive presentation by Joey Molina, a talk by Chris Fernald, and a performance by Nathaniel Mondragon, with an artist talk back to follow.
Educator— Atlanta Contemporary Trend Forecasting Workshop
2020
Introductory workshop in trend forecasting’s foundations. Much like another popular predictive discipline—astrology—trend forecasting may, at first, appear wildly subjective and imprecise; however, the foundation of trend prediction is anything but, relying upon mathematical calculations and the careful collection and organization of empirical data. Indeed, trend forecasting provides us with a valuable, flexible methodology for deciphering the world around us and predicting its next movements, whether looking to spot the next fashion trend or predict the influence of TikTok on contemporary art. Video here.
Public Conversation—Emma McMillan: Painting and Architecture
2019
Artist Emma McMillan, Joey Molina, and I discuss her new show ‘Project X,’ on view in Gallery 2 of the Atlanta Contemporary. Playfully conflating tropes of postmodern painting and architecture, the show reinterprets famed Atlanta architect John Portman’s oeuvre through the language of paint. Audio here.
Educator—Discrit Semester One
2018
Discrit Semester One is a free art theory class and discussion group that ran across seven sessions from February 2018 to May 2018, concluding with a public screening and discussion of 'What the Heart Wants' by Cécile B. Evans. The course examines the state of the body in an age of technological mediation, a subject students dissected through intersecting lenses of contemporary feminism, race, biotechnology, late capitalism, cyborg theory, and a variety of relevant artistic practices, activist strategies, and philosophical concerns. The curriculum of each class can be found here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.