Original Painting: Recoil; Reframe

Throughout 2025, my social media algorithm brought me recurring themes: ambient anxiety, emotional burnout, existential dread, hopelessness, and collective rage. To capture this year’s frenetic emotional landscape and my attempts to cope beyond doom scrolling, I turned to the distress-tolerance skills from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). I relayed my personal use of them conceptually through six abstract pieces in a body of work titled "Opposite Action"—a DBT skill that involves acting contrary to an emotion’s urge when that emotion doesn’t fit the facts or when following it would be harmful. When anxiety tells us to avoid, we approach. When anger demands we lash out, we intentionally do something to soften. When shame drags us down to hide, we show ourselves, even if begrudgingly.

In this piece, Recoil, Reframe, I was interested in being an amateur cartographer of internal terrain at the moment when I attempt to shift out of initial revulsion. I charted emotional progressions, inflection points where feelings transform, and the physiological shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system, however minute. The abstract forms explore how changing our actions can shift our emotional states—how movement through physical and material space can create the conditions for a different emotional state.