A Cosmic Shower:
In “A Cosmic Shower”, I use the structure of a shower as a framework to connect my subject matter. While the artwork is grounded in a single composition. Through a symbolic and layered visual system it reflects some of my broader interests in systems of connection, transformation, and emergence.
While creating this artwork, I thought about concepts such as string theory, panspermia, genetic drift, and quantum mechanics. I was thinking about the relationships between science, and philosophy. These ideas influenced how I approached relationships between objects in the painting, not as literal interpretations, but as metaphors for interaction and dependency across systems.
As an artist, I thought about molecular reactions to cultural structures to cosmic forces. I think about how tangible and intangible forces interact to shape reality, and how meaning is formed through constant interaction rather than isolated events. I see existence as a continuous chain of reactions—physical, biological, and cultural—where each layer influences and is influenced by another. Repeating, and connecting across different scales.
In this painting I creatively use my practice to explore these relationships visually; using familiar imagery to suggest larger interconnected systems. Through my work, I aim to create spaces where scientific ideas and human experience overlap. Allowing viewers to reflect on how the same forces that shape the universe may also be present in everyday life..
This painting has many different art subjects. I built this artwork with concepts in its color, design, hierarchy, and of course—the title. First, I chose to call this a cosmic shower, because I thought a lot about panspermia, the great attractor, and our culture. In a manner of speaking; I imagined we mix like elements, changing temperatures, and it’s all spiraling through the pitch-black drain of the cosmos.
The sun simply symbolizes the various ways it impacts our lives. From changing temperatures, effecting our biosphere, and warping our known interplanetary environment. I personified the sun because it’s critical to our way of life from myths to facts. I wanted the personification in this painting to represent the multiple tales.
Underneath the sun, I painted a landscape that entails some clouds. There is water pouring over the rim of a bath tub creating a waterfall. The waterfall bends and cuts through an open field. This symbolizes our known existence, and like a totem pole there is a hierarchy. Our world sits at the bottom. The landscape isn’t detailed for (2) reasons: First, it symbolizes our natural flow as we leave our foot print in time. Second, it symbolizes our knowledge of our own planet.
The bathtub contains several systems operating at once. The shower head pipe is not normal. Instead, a black hole replaces the fixture. I use a black hole because it is a force that distorts known reality. It releases its own radioactive “streams,” bending what we understand as structure and flow.
The pipe splits at the top in a Y-shape. This upward division symbolizes the Y-axis. Since black holes distort the mathematical fabric of the universe.
I painted a green line with an X near the sun’s left arm, symbolizing the X-axis.
Beneath the sun, where a red sunset/line forms, it becomes the Z-axis. Each subject sits on a known plane of existence—except the black hole, which does not obey it.
Planets form inside the bubble of the shower, suggesting that matter, compounds, and forces are not stable but continuously assembling and dissolving.
Steam becomes culture—an unstable mixture of forces converging into something breathable yet invisible. Like steam in a shower, it is water, air, residue, temperature, and scent collapsing into one field.
It enters the lungs without permission. In this painting, the steam carries particles and color mapped to a CPK molecule scheme. It suggests that even what appears soft or fleeting is still governed by atomic logic.
Then finally, white—nothingness. Not absence, but silence within structure. A blank canvas that does not comfort, but persists. For many, it is an abyss. For me, it is a continuous field—white, ongoing, and unresolved.
Black holes remain central to my thinking. They are not just objects, but distortions in comprehension itself. I find them exotic and deeply unknowable. They raise questions that do not resolve easily: are we inside one already, held within a larger “great attraction”? Are we moving toward a singularity we cannot conceptualize from within? The scale of these structures expands beyond certainty. Some theories suggest they shape galaxies as much as they consume them. Whether this is true or not becomes secondary to the pull of the idea itself.
This work constructs a closed system where domestic space is not comfort, but architecture of the cosmos. A shower becomes a model of existence under pressure—where everyday materials mirror universal forces that cannot be escaped, only observed.