WHAT CAME THROUGH
What Came Through began with a simple question: What happens when two human beings try to communicate across a wall of propaganda, loneliness, fear, technology, and political identity?
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I began using my cell phone to enter online spaces where Russians were looking for anonymous personal connections. I wasn't looking for an argument. I wanted to see if it was possible to have a human conversation with someone on the other side of a political divide that seemed almost impossible to cross.
I shared photographs, handmade signs, political cartoons, and drawings made by Ukrainian children. Sometimes I received photographs and personal stories in return. Other times there was silence, suspicion, anger, or a conversation that simply stopped.
The work grew out of those encounters.
The colored pencil drawings in this series begin with screenshots I captured from my cell phone over the course of several years. These were fleeting images—moments that existed on a screen, inside private conversations, and within the constantly changing flow of the internet. I took those temporary digital encounters and slowly translated them by hand onto basswood panels using colored pencil.
That transformation is important to the work. Something that could disappear with the swipe of a finger becomes something physical, permanent, and painstakingly made. The hours required to draw each image stand in sharp contrast to the speed with which these photographs, messages, drawings, and ideas can travel across a screen.
I am interested in what happens to an image or an idea as it moves from one person to another. A photograph can be evidence, propaganda, memory, or manipulation. A child's drawing can carry a truth that a political argument cannot. A phone screen can bring two strangers together while simultaneously keeping them physically and emotionally separated.
These works are not an attempt to resolve the political divide between us and them. They are about the fragile space between two people trying to reach one another when almost everything around them is telling them not to.
The question is not whether we agreed.
The question is:
What came through?
