noumenal works across painting, digital processes, and pen plotting, moving images between hand, scanner, and a vintage HP 7475a plotter. The work investigates self-construction: how identity accumulates and erodes, and how people come to know themselves through relation. Based in Brooklyn, New York, the artist trained in the New Genres program at the San Francisco Art Institute before earning a PhD in philosophy from MIT.
The pseudonym noumenal comes from Kant's transcendental idealism, the realm of things-in-themselves that can never be fully known. The artist studied formal logic at UC Berkeley before completing the MIT PhD in 2016. The dissertation argued that art is a complex kind made up of interrelated definitions rather than one fixed definition. The series epistolary studies consists of ChatGPT-generated letters to historical aesthetic thinkers explaining art on the blockchain, produced by combining pen plotter drawing with digital paint. The series Wayfinding combines photographs of the artist's own physical paintings with hand-painted gouache and pen plotter drawing.
