THE RESIDUAL

In The Residual, power is no longer represented as a stable structure. It has passed through accumulation, containment, absorption, and authority, leaving behind something far more difficult to define: its imprint.

Fragments of destroyed currency gather into an unstable, almost human presence—recognizable enough to suggest a body, yet too fractured to become one. Fine vertical lines rise and descend through the composition like the remnants of an abandoned system: coordinates, boundaries, circuits, or instruments whose original purpose has disappeared. The figure does not stand apart from this architecture; it is assembled from it.

Within Portraits of Invisible Power, The Residual marks a critical shift. Where Static Authority considers power at the moment it becomes so normalized that it disappears into the surrounding atmosphere, The Residual asks what remains after that power has already entered us.

The shredded currency carries particular significance here. Money has been stripped of its monetary function, but not of its visual memory. Its fragments continue to organize themselves, much as systems of value continue to shape identity even after their authority is questioned, dismantled, or rejected.

What emerges is neither liberation nor defeat. It is residue: memory, fracture, uncertainty, and the faint persistence of something human within the structures that formed it.

The Residual is a portrait of what power leaves behind when its visible form is gone.

Portraits of Invisible Power, No. 9
24 × 36 × 2 in.
Paper, acrylics, and shredded currency on stretched canvas, 2026