The Cost of Lies

We do not stop because we must not stop. That is the first truth of this work — and perhaps the most uncomfortable one. To live alongside sustained falsehood is to be caught between two impossible positions: challenging lies that will not yield and learning to carry what cannot be corrected. Neither option is clean. The tension between them is where this work lives.

The Cost of Lies does not treat lying as something that happens at a distance. It treats it as a condition — chronic, cumulative, and resistant to resolution. Lies do not disappear when they are named. They persist. They leave a mark on the people who oppose them as surely as on those who believe them.

Each image begins with the word lies, mechanically printed and embedded beneath layers of wax. The surface is carved, crossed out, obscured — and then again, and again — in gestures borrowed from redaction, censorship, correction. The repetition is not incidental. It is the work. Each mark is an act of obligation, and the accumulation of those acts across a single image — and across all of them — enacts the tireless, necessary, never-finished labor of challenging what refuses to yield.

But the word remains. Beneath the wax, beneath the damage, it is still there. The act of opposition leaves its own scar. That too is part of the cost — and part of the commitment.

The Cost of Lies does not offer resolution. It holds the tension: between the necessity of resistance and the reality of persistence, between the damage lies do and the damage done in opposing them. The viewer enters that space and is left to decide what it means, and what it demands of them.

The Cost of Lies is produced in a limited edition of 30. Ocean View, DE – 2026