“You’ve Seen It Before” is a series of large-scale collages made from street-level billboard advertisements pulled from walls across Los Angeles. The works begin with what is already there: printed vinyl, torn paper, faces, product shots, typography, fragments of color and texture.

Crews are hired to paste these advertisements onto walls and utility boxes throughout the city. The job is simple: paste the poster, photograph it, and send the image back to the client. Installers are paid for proof of placement, not for presence. Whether the poster lasts a month or ten seconds is irrelevant. Many of these postings are technically illegal but rarely enforced. The transaction is completed the moment the photograph is sent.

These advertisements are built to convert attention into desire. They suggest that fulfillment sits just beyond the next purchase, the next version of ourselves. They project non-futures, lives without illness, doubt, or uncertainty, images of completeness that no one actually lives.

In the studio, the materials determine the starting point. I do not choose the palette or the imagery in advance. Whatever is available from the street is what I have to work with. The first stage is deliberate. Fragments are assembled into a long horizontal composition, searching for continuities and tensions across unrelated sources.

Then the work is cut diagonally.

The cut is intentional and irreversible. It dismantles the image I just built and produces a new set of angled bands. From that point forward, I am responding rather than directing. The fragments dictate new alignments, new collisions, new structures. Each stage narrows the field of options. There is no return to the previous composition.

Painted fields are added not to conceal the source material, but to stabilize what has emerged, to give weight and contrast to something discovered rather than predetermined.

The finished works hold tension between fracture and continuity, graphic sharpness and painterly depth. They carry traces of their origin but no longer function as advertisements.

What is being sold to us was ours to begin with.