Current Projects

The Boulder Series

2025 to 2026

Completed / Available on itch.io

The Boulder Series is a 10-issue literary zine serializing the story of Darwin, a remote contractor trapped in cycles of being simultaneously fired and rehired, and his roommate Jeff, an OnlyFans creator whose entire vocabulary has been colonized by platform logic. Written in 1,500–2,000 word installments with pulp aesthetics and satirical fake advertisements, the series examines platform capitalism not as distant economic critique but as intimate, daily violation.

The narrative arc follows Darwin through what the gig economy has already done to Camus’s myth — stripped it for parts, repackaged the struggle as a subscription, and called the boulder a growth opportunity. Darwin begins as someone purely acted upon, pushed by forces he can’t control: unpaid invoices from his abusive client-employer Cordy, rent perpetually due, a charity check that bounces, relationships mediated entirely through Betty AI. By the final issue, Darwin hasn’t climbed anything. He’s moved laterally — different client, better terms, same economy. He’s found something that can’t be monetized, can’t feed any algorithm, and exists outside of extraction. The series doesn’t resolve systemic problems. It locates the small, real victories that exist alongside them. It ends where Camus’s essay does, but the happiness isn’t joy — it’s the existence of a consequence he designed: “One must imagine Darwin happy now.”

All ten issues are available as PDFs on itch.io →. Every purchase goes directly toward funding a print run of the complete series.

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A Study in Cartography: Fragments and Patterns

2025 to date

Completed / Ongoing Reader Engagement

Project Statement

A Study in Cartography explores whether cognitive architecture can be transmitted through narrative structure. The work investigates a specific question: can a reader connect with fragmented, recursive storytelling not because they fully understand the content, but because they recognize the pattern of thinking that created it?

This project grew from my experience at the 2022 Whitney Biennial, encountering Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s videos and works in a dedicated space. I felt an immediate connection to her work without knowing who she was or anything about her context. I bought Dictée afterward, found it nearly impossible to understand, but felt compelled to surrender to its difficulty. Something spoke to me beyond language or cultural reference—a recognition of something familiar in how the work was structured.

The zine follows Mateo, a refugee child navigating displacement, trauma, and language acquisition through a fragmented consciousness that processes experience like a video game. Memory fragments, sensory overload, and survival mechanisms create a recursive narrative structure that mirrors how the mind actually adapts under pressure. The story maps Mateo’s consciousness through his journey of integration and self-discovery.

I want to test whether pattern recognition can create connection across the gaps between strangers’ experiences. Not understanding the story, but understanding the mind that made it.

The work functions as both artwork and experiment: documenting whether pattern recognition can create connection across the gaps between strangers, languages, experiences; whether the way we think can be a form of communication itself.

The investigation: Can an art object designed from specific cognitive architecture locate readers who share that architecture? The project tracks circulation through zine fairs, bookstores, and social media exchanges, documenting which readers engage deeply enough to contact the artist post-reading.

Methodology: Hand-production of 25 copies using kettle stitching that resembles neural pathways, distributed through targeted venues, with systematic documentation of reader responses and contact patterns.

Cartography Images Layout
A Study in Cartography - Cover Design
A Study in Cartography - Kettle Stitch Spine
A Study in Cartography - Introduction
A Study in Cartography - Gaming
A Study in Cartography - Neuroplasticity

Format: 5.5″ x 8.5″, 74 pages

Materials: copy paper, linen thread binding

Binding: 3 signatures, kettle stitch binding

Edition: 25 hand-made copies, numbered

Distribution: Direct artist engagement with readers and distributors

NYC is Big, My Dreams are Bigger

2025 to date

Completed / Seeking Readers

Project Statement

I created NYC is Big, My Dreams are Bigger because I want to capture what I know to be true—that displacement fractures time, that survival requires navigating backwards through shame and secrets, that the “American Dream” often demands invisible sacrifices we’re not supposed to discuss.

The bidirectional zine format is necessary. Edwin’s story moves forward because that’s how we expect male immigrant narratives to work—arrival, ambition, momentum. Stella’s story excavates backwards because women’s truths about survival are often buried, accessible only by digging through what’s been hidden or erased.

I wanted readers to feel displacement in their hands, to experience the disorientation of not knowing how to navigate something familiar. The physical form forces the same adaptation immigrants face—you can’t consume this story passively. You have to work with unfamiliar systems to get the full picture.

My goal is to compress multiple truths into one small object: how sexual violence becomes the unspoken “fee” for escape; how childhood trauma shapes adult decisions; how Catholic shame operates differently across gender lines; how even intimate partnerships can’t survive certain silences. I’m trying to show that these complexities aren’t side effects of immigrant experience—they are immigrant experience.

The convergent ending—their recognition under the streetlamp—happens not because they’ve resolved anything, but because survival sometimes looks like finding each other again despite carrying impossible weights. That’s the truth I wanted to preserve.

Physical Construction

Structure: Bidirectional narrative (Edwin front-to-back, Stella back-to-front)

Binding: Canary recycled paper, 5 signatures, French link stitch

Design: An original photograph of the Queensboro Bridge, re-imaged for the convergence point where both narratives meet. At this center is a collage using vintage photographs of a Filipino man and woman from the 1950s and 60s, layered with another bridge photograph taken from underneath.

Distribution: Ongoing, seeking readers

The Long Game

2025 to date

Completed/Seeking Readers

Project Statement

The concluding work in a trilogy that includes “A Study in Cartography” and “NYC is Big, My Dreams are Bigger,” “The Long Game” synthesizes real experiences from multiple sources into a fictional narrative that exposes the human cost of digital-age colonialism. Set in an offshore call center operating under the cover of international flower delivery, the story follows agents who survive by extracting emotional and financial resources from elderly Americans—a system that transforms victims into perpetrators while diffusing moral responsibility across global economic structures.

The narrative centers on three primary figures: Erika, a local agent funding her sister’s nursing education through two years of psychological compromise; Angel, a nineteen-year-old whose moral clarity prevents him from accessing the collective rationalization mechanisms his colleagues have developed; and Martin (nicknamed “Goldfish”), a supervisor planning his escape while orchestrating systematic exploitation. Their stories intersect in a call center designed as panopticon, where complete surveillance enables both maximum extraction and psychological control.

This work explores how neoliberal economic structures create conditions where survival necessitates participation in harm. The agents are simultaneously victims and perpetrators—exploited by currency differentials and visa vulnerabilities while forced to exploit others through manufactured intimacy. The company profits from both the labor extraction and the psychological damage that prevents organized resistance.

I’m particularly interested in emotional labor as the new frontier of colonial extraction. Unlike traditional colonialism’s focus on raw materials or physical labor, digital colonialism harvests the capacity for human connection itself. Agents perform authentic care while systematically betraying that care—a form of psychological violence that traditional labor analysis fails to address.

Available in digital format for free, suggested donation right here.

Position in Migration Trilogy

As the final work in a trilogy that began with A Study in Cartography and continued with NYC is Big, My Dreams are Bigger, The Long Game focuses on economic displacement—how global economic pressures force people into geographic and moral territories they would not otherwise choose. Where previous installments explored physical and cultural displacement, this work investigates psychological displacement: the internal exile required when survival demands participating in harm.

Physical Construction

Format: 5.5″ x 8.5″, 54 pages

Materials: Pastel gray copy paper, red linen thread binding

Binding: 3 signatures, kettle stitch binding

Design: Intentionally gritty, like a word-down confidential document. The red thread as a marker for the violence that runs through the narrative.

Distribution: Ongoing, seeking readers

Butterfly

2026

Completed / Available on itch.io

Project Statement

Butterfly is structured as a series of therapy sessions between Caroline, a school principal, and her therapist, Dr. Malaya. Caroline recounts her obsessive attraction to Vanessa, a graduate teaching assistant at her school — a relationship that couldn’t exist within the institutional structure that brought them together, and that destroyed what it couldn’t contain.

I wrote this because I’m interested in what happens when desire collides with systems that weren’t built to accommodate it. Caroline is a queer woman with a doctorate and a career who understands power dynamics intellectually — she runs a school, everyone reports to her — and still walks directly into one she can’t control. The institutional hierarchy that prevents her from speaking to Vanessa as a peer is the same structure that makes the transgression irresistible. The therapy session format allowed me to keep Caroline’s voice uninterrupted while the therapist’s questions become the architecture that holds the confession together, or tries to.

The story moves through obsession, boundary erosion, sexual violence, and grief — not as a cautionary arc but as a map of how longing accumulates when it has nowhere legitimate to go. Caroline’s earlier losses — a miscarriage, a partner who left her in Bali, parents who needed only each other — surface not as explanations but as pressure that was already there before Vanessa walked in.

The photographs are mine. They function as silences between sessions.

Physical Construction

Format: 5.5″ x 8.5″, 36 pages

Materials: Laser-printed on copy paper, linen thread binding

Binding: 2 signatures, hand-stitched

Edition: 20 hand-made copies, numbered and initialed (6 available)

Distribution: Hand-stitched edition $25, digital PDF $7 on itch.io

Longitudinal Portrait Series: Naiomi S.

2020 – Present

Ongoing

Project Statement

The longitudinal Portrait Project: Naiomi  is more than just an attempt to capture identity formation but it also documents how relationships evolve when given space to breathe, how the camera records transformation that happens too slowly for daily observation, how the ritual of annual meeting—a deliberate constraint—creates its own form of connection. I photograph Naiomi once per year—no more—with only occasional text messages between sessions. We save our conversations for these annual meetings, creating a rhythm that mirrors how relationships actually develop: through accumulated time rather than constant contact.

The project began in 2020 when Naiomi was seventeen, a high school senior on a museum trip. What started as a straightforward portrait has become documentation of parallel transformations—hers and mine, individual and relational. Each year’s photograph captures not just her aging and life changes, but how our dynamic shifts: how I see her differently, how she sees me differently, how the camera records what we might not consciously recognize.

By 2024, when she graduated college, we both noticed the change in how we related to each other—and the portrait I captured that year shows it. The photographs become artifacts of a specific kind of intimacy: the accumulation of annual encounters, the weight of witnessed change, the way photographer and subject grow into new versions of themselves together.

During our September 2025 session, Naiomi asked to break tradition and meet more than once yearly. I agreed, uncertain whether abandoning the annual constraint would transform the very thing I was trying to document. But we’re humans, first meeting as mentor/mentee, then as photographer/subject, then as friends. This moment itself becomes part of what I’m documenting: the point where our connection had evolved beyond the project’s original constraints. The annual boundary that had served to create space for organic relationship development was no longer necessary—the constraint had succeeded in fostering a genuine connection that could now sustain itself without artificial limits.

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