I made this series in Dubai, where I was waiting tables at the JW Marriott and living in a city built from everyone's elsewhere. Cosmopolitical City is that place: cultural fusion at full volume in a global hub, every origin pressed against every other.
The material came from Dragon Mart, the enormous Chinese mall on the edge of the city. In a cramped hardware stall I found printer toner, sold cheap, and wanted to see what I could make it do. The method became toner and heat: CMYK toner laid across watercolour paper and cooked in a domestic oven, which fixes and warps the colour. Toner is the pigment of reproduction, the four inks every printed image is built from, the DNA of media. Run through heat at home, industrial reproduction becomes handmade and unrepeatable.
This is the series the later work grows from. After Dubai the toner work stopped for years, and came back in 2025 in Cromática Diaspórica y Arrecha, turned away from the global hub and toward Caracas and the diaspora.
Works from the series are held in private collections.
