Volitia Daydreams

Rutgers Cancer Institute, Permanent Installation, New Brunswick, NJ, 2025

What inspires a daydream? Looking up, looking closely, looking back, looking forward, looking inward, looking around? Maybe it's music or movement, something funny or a great idea. It could be observing the way wind plays with leaves on the branches of a tree or water rushing over rocks in a stream. For me, it is a collection of lines and marks that wander across walls and paper, making stories out of abstract heroes who like to fly and float, with color and speed, reimagining time and turning it into air. 

“Volitia Daydreams” is a permanent installation made of three site-specific wall drawings and twelve new pencil and gouache drawings on paper, created for the 5th floor of the Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. It is the latest episode in the ongoing, serial adventure: “Volitia.” Each wall, a drawn multiple with unique, printed superimpositions, hung in relief, represents an open-ended chapter, subverting familiar notions of beginning, middle and end. Lines, colors and characters repeat and recalibrate, re-arranging themselves from wall to wall. The superimpositions reconfigure like fluctuating thought-bubbles, establishing a separate correspondence with time, like the difference between dreams and weather. 

The building itself, so full of movement, transparency, warmth and light, set the tone for the drawings, which strive to incorporate moments of repose and spontaneous imagining. Ultimately, the murals are activated by each viewer, in an ever-shifting relationship to a story with multiple points of entry and a capacious sense of joy and possibility. 

The work for this installation came from an intensive period of drawing and several site visits to the building, still under construction in New Brunswick. I drew inspiration both from the shape and experience of the architecture, as well as, from a few specific works of art. I had to figure out how to make a wall drawing without drawing on the wall. I thought about Andy Warhol’s “Wallpaper and Clouds” installation at Castelli Gallery in New York City from 1966. I looked at Matisse’s Cut-Outs, especially “The Swimming Pool,” which has been on view until recently at MOMA, and “The Parakeet and the Mermaid,” from 1952 - a ravishing, organic abstract story. I had just seen the “Orphism in Paris” exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, so several works by Sonia Delaunay were on my mind. “Electric Prisms” from 1914 and “Bal Bullier” 1913. And then, in the studio, books were open to Roy Lichtenstein’s “Painting: Bamboo Frame,” 1984, with its celebratory, graphic brushstrokes and funny deliberation on the function of “framing” in Painting and to Vincent Van Gogh’s pen and ink drawing, “Sun above the Walled Field,” 1889, because of the way the incremental mark proceeds and accrues such radiance. 

An enormous thank you to The Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Jodi Moise and Mona Chen, JMC Art Partners, Kenise Barnes and Lani Ming Holloway, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Frank Del Valle and Ana Vallejo, Picto New York. This was a unique challenge and opportunity, your collective expertise was invaluable.