In 1924, during the last year of his life, Franz Kafka encountered a little girl in a Berlin park who was inconsolable after losing her favorite doll. Kafka began writing and reciting letters to the little girl “from the doll” who had “gone on a trip to see the world”. This exchange culminated in Kafka gifting her a new doll with a note explaining that the doll’s travels had “changed her” and that she was, in fact, her lost doll. Years later, the now-grown woman found tucked inside the doll a tiny piece of paper that read “Everything you love in life is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”  

A box suspended by a pulley in the sky containing Harry Houdini, Atreyu from the 1984 film The NeverEnding Story — snow in his hair — gazing beyond the picture plane into a scrying mirror, the constellation Canis Major— its stars made up of lab-grown diamonds, Salomon August Andrée, a 19th century explorer looking out at his collapsing hot air balloon that now rests on Arctic ice, a fragment of a Clyfford Still painting frozen in time.

The philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in 1757 that he believed the concept of infinity could just as likely be found in a tiny seashell as in a vast landscape. He also reasoned that beauty was rarely associated with grand and large objects, but almost always met with the words “tiny” or "little" (a beautiful little thing). I was thinking of Burke when I began making these small drawings one year ago, especially when embedding some of them with diamonds. I wanted the associations connected to diamonds, such as love, beauty, and the idea of “forever,” to be embedded in them as well. 

This show is a selection from a series of over 200 drawings that orbit themes of love, loss, and little histories that risk obliteration. These drawings take their reference from images I want to preserve — to bring them back from their time, to return them to now. They serve both as warnings and reminders that losses occur, things forever change, but beauty and love return.  

- Joey