2025
F - SDS - 0212
Exhibition / Fine Art
Drawing Series under development.
Inverted Icons: Speculum Mortis is a speculative drawing series exploring the liminal space between life and death, earth and heaven, memory and loss. Drawing on classical and religious works found throughout Rome, each piece reinterprets canonical imagery—such as Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam or Caravaggio’s Narcissus—through inversion, distortion, and decay. These are not mere reproductions, but reflections seen through a darker lens: a speculum mortis, or “mirror of death.”
The series emerged following a recent move to Rome, where I found myself surrounded by allegorically charged works that have endured for centuries—frescoes, sculptures, and paintings imbued with mythic symbolism, suspended between the sacred and the mortal. In the presence of these immortal forms, I became fascinated with what lies on the underside of such permanence. What happens when these icons are turned inward, when the divine is rendered fallible?
By inverting these cultural touchstones, Inverted Icons invites viewers to confront the thresholds they represent—to see death not as an end, but as a passage. Each reimagined image engages with the original’s embedded narrative, not to erase it, but to expose its underside. In this mirrored state, divine gestures falter, heroic figures fragment, and mythic clarity gives way to ambiguity. These re-presentations do not aim to resolve or reinterpret definitively, but to dislodge the familiar and open space for new readings—where reverence and ruin, memory and mortality, exist in tension.