THE MEDIUM (2026)

An archangel steps forward holding a mirror in one hand and a megaphone in the other, dressed in the yellow, white, and crimson of the old colonial angel paintings. The frame around him is a circuit board, painted by hand in gold on green. Medium carries three meanings at once. It is the channel a message travels through, the person who speaks for the dead, and the material an artist works in. All three are standing in this panel. The mirror shows us to ourselves. The megaphone amplifies whatever it is handed, true or not. Behind him a broken sign reads ALIEN, and hidden inside the word is A LIE.

The word angel comes from the Greek angelos, which simply means messenger. In Christianity, angels were the original messaging system, held to be carriers of unquestioned divine truth. In the pagan tradition, Mercury, the Roman name for Hermes, was the go-between who carried messages from the gods to mortals, and he was also the patron of tricksters, thieves, and liars. From Hermes we get hermeneutics, the art of interpretation. The quicksilver that bears his name was once used to silver the backs of mirrors, so there is mercury in the mirror this angel holds up. This is the mercurial nature of the trickster archetype, and the painting keeps both readings in play.

Above him, a camera eye inside a pyramid pours out a celestial light that becomes his halo. A communications tower rises behind the sign, a drone hovers at his side, and a wooden wheel lies at his feet, the cyclical, interconnected surveillance state we live in today. As angel or as trickster, this messenger mirrors what we carry inside and amplifies whatever we already believe, the same way a large language model does.