05/14/2025
Voor Thecla
On view at the Arts Council of Princeton, May 17 - June 14th.
Opening Saturday May 17th, 4 - 6 pm
Voor Thecla is a series of images made from a beautiful bouquet a Dutch friend gave me to thank me for hosting her in my home. The flowers captured her exuberance and wonderful friendship, and I wanted to hold onto that—to reinterpret it as a gift in return.
I’ve since reimagined these images in different ways. In this installation, they’re presented as a grid of six acrylic pieces (each 20 x 16 in.) for my show Being Present at the Arts Council of Princeton.
This spring, Shruti Sharma, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, invited me to collaborate on an installation for the 2025 Biennale Architettura in Venice, Italy. When she visited my studio and saw this work, she immediately felt it embodied the essence of her research on quantum dots and energy behavior.
Our conversations have always centered on energy transfer—something I first felt in the simple, heartfelt gesture of receiving that bouquet from a dear friend. These images began as a way to return that energy, to translate our friendship into visual form. When Shruti saw them and connected them to her research, it felt like a continuation of that exchange—an expanding circle of resonance and connection.
As Shruti put it beautifully for our Venice collaboration:
“This elegant interplay of proximity, compatibility, and energy alignment offers more than scientific insight—it serves as a powerful metaphor for human relationships. Just as FRET (Förster Resonance Energy Transfer) requires closeness and resonance, so do meaningful human connections. Energy flows most freely between people who are attuned to one another—when one is bright, the other can resonate, and together they ‘transfer energy’ through emotional resonance. In this way, FRET becomes a framework for understanding the dynamics of connection: when alignment, distance, and energy are just right, something magical can happen.”