You Are Giving Universe (YAGU) | Release

This is the first drop that accompanies the inaugural vignette in YAGU, setting the tone for the project. Y2K heat. Bags. Stones.

You Are Giving Universe (YAGU) is a new body of work that I’m debuting at Sculpture Month Houston 2025, in the exhibition Re-Figurations, curated by Volker Eisele at Site Gallery Houston (Oct 4–Nov 22, 2025).

During Sculpture Month Houston, the videos are installed as an environment. Online, I’m releasing them week by week across Instagram, TikTok, and Zora, alongside commentary and fragments from the original scripts. Each post carries its own “comment drop” : a small artifact, clip, or sketch that extends the work when someone engages. I also share the pieces on Teia, where selected videos are available as editions, on Zora they appear as social posts.

The Sculpture Month installation is the first chapter in a longer project. Houston is the launch, as cycle will keep growing through new vignettes, writings, and experiments shared here.

YAGU grew out of an interest in advertising stripped of its core subject (like a lot of my videos through the years). These videos borrow the quick rhythm of TikTok tutorials and AI “how-to” clips — short, clear steps, looping arcs — but remove the product, the buyer, the maker, maybe even the concept. What remains is a set of poetic ad-formal vignettes: human figures as vessels, not subjects; AI-generated surfaces that reference fashion, commerce, and mysticism without ever resolving into a brand.

Somehow this creates a Zen absence, an empty stage where meaning can’t be fixed but still feels present. The work uses the familiar cadence of ads to create something closer to ritual than commerce. In that absence, viewers often recognize the same qualities sought in meditation or devotion — stillness, attention, reciprocity. What looks like an ad without a product is also a small koan devoted to the sacred in paradox. The empty, pure, sparkling, fully realized spirit of capitalism.

The project leans on Y2K aesthetics, deadpan captions, and esoteric motifs, playing with the tension between clear instructional cadence and meaning that continually evaporates.

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