The Door Is Right There

This digital experience is designed to accompany physical installations at ART150 in Jersey City. Scroll down to enjoy the audio and explore the virtual exhibition.

Exhibition Statement

  • The idea for this show came to me while watching Bluey, a children's cartoon where a frustrated mother keeps telling her dawdling kids, "The door is right there!" She's trying to get them outside to play with friends, but they keep finding excuses to delay — brushing teeth, finding the perfect toy, adjusting their hat. What strikes me is that the children aren't being defiant; they're nervous about reconnecting with a friend they haven't seen in a while.

    I realized we adults do the same dance of hesitation. We linger in toxic relationships, stagnant jobs, cycles of familiar suffering, even when we know better. We create our own simulated world of fears and excuses because crossing the threshold — actually wanting something different — requires a kind of courage and effort that feels overwhelming. The door is always right there, but knowing it and walking through it are entirely different things.

  • This exhibition transforms the literal threshold of our studio building into a semi-guided meditation experience. Each composition in the show is a map and a gateway at the same time. Try following the flow, count the strokes as you go, pause to reflect on how color cadence affects your mental state, pay attention to your breath and notice if it changes as you move in a circle around the room. We see the exit. We know it's there. But knowing and crossing the threshold are different things.

  • These works are part of my ongoing creative research into consciousness expansion — I'm building my own map for navigating what I call the "lifeverse." Each group of paintings is intended as a visual navigation system, documenting my exploration of different spiritual frameworks: Kundalini, Monroe Institute psychoacoustic work, Astrology, Advaita Vedanta, Kabbalah etc. I seek out immersive, in-person experiences with each practice to engage not just my mind, but also my physical body. My Temporal Psychoexpression practice captures these explorations. Each mark represents a moment of presence, each layer a step deeper into understanding. The counted strokes become like breadcrumbs on a trail — evidence of where consciousness has traveled and markers for others who might follow.

    These artworks are fragments of a larger puzzle, my gateways to possibilities beyond the physical world. They invite viewers to step through their own thresholds of perception and join me in mapping new territories of awareness. After all, we're all looking for the right exit that turns out to be an entrance to a better life.

  • In the spirit of honest offering, I acknowledge that not every door calls to every soul. Some may find these gateways too slow, too contemplative, too concerned with the invisible architecture of consciousness. For them, the door is quite literally right there — an exit is as valid as any entrance.

    But for those who choose to linger, who recognize their own threshold-hesitation in these works, who feel the pull toward integration rather than escape — these pieces offer glimpses into the vast, interconnected reality that awaits when we finally decide wewant to step through.

    The door is right there. It always has been. The only question is: are you ready to want what you've been avoiding?

Ad Astra Per Samadhi

Inspired by Kundalini Yoga practice

  • This vertical series of hexagonal paintings maps a journey inspired by the ancient framework of Kundalini awakening — the energy force envisioned as a serpent that lies dormant at the base of the spine, waiting to rise through the chakra system toward divine consciousness.

    Each piece is a meditative recording of a specific life moment, documented through hundreds of counted brushstrokes in my Temporal Psychoexpression practice — a ritual of presence that mirrors the patient, repetitive work of spiritual awakening. Like the repetitive motion and breathwork of Kundalini yoga, my brushstrokes accumulate simple movements into energy-charged visual forms.

  • The color palette ascends through the chakra system with deliberate precision: from the deep reds of Muladhara (survival, grounding) through the oranges of Svadhisthana (creativity, sexuality), the golden yellows of Manipura (personal power), the greens of Anahata (love, connection), the blues of Vishuddha (truth, expression), the purples of Ajna (intuition, insight), culminating in the blank white of Sahasrara — the crown chakra where individual consciousness dissolves into cosmic awareness.

    The hexagonal form itself speaks to the sacred geometry underlying creation, while the golden leaf edges create luminous halos around each energy center, acknowledging the divinity within every stage of the journey. In Kundalini yoga practice, we learn that each chakra holds both shadow and light; these paintings honor the full spectrum of human experience as sacred territory. Each hexagon is an encoded memory of a specific moment in my life, when emotions were so thick and palpable I needed a container for them.

  • Arranged in upward progression, the series embodies the fundamental promise of Kundalini: that consciousness can rise from the density of material existence toward the lightness of pure awareness. The empty white hexagon at the crown means not absence but arrival — the silent space of Samadhi where the seeker dissolves into the source, where the counted strokes become an uncountable presence, where the personal journey reveals itself as the universal path.

    This is just the beginning, a cracked door. The next dimensional shift is around the corner at a 90-degree angle.

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Convergence

Inspired by Monroe Institute Gateway process

  • This triptych of circular paintings — The Event Horizon, The Cosmic Egg, and The Eye of Time — maps a journey through the general architecture of consciousness.

    Inspired by Robert Monroe's Hemi-Sync sound technology and discoveries in neurobiology and quantum mechanics, this series explores the ideas of the implicate order of the Universe where all and everything is interconnected and Time doesn’t exist.

    Robert Monroe's research declares that specific sound frequencies can synchronize brain hemispheres, inducing altered states of consciousness and access to non-ordinary reality. His "Focus States" mapped territories of awareness beyond physical perception, revealing consciousness as a navigable dimension rather than neurological brain activity.

  • The Event Horizon (right) marks the threshold of ordinary perception: black hole's boundary, this is where linear time begins to bend, where consciousness approaches the edge of its own mystery.

    The Cosmic Egg (center) embodies the moment when light ignites physical matter. Just as the union of ovum and sperm releases a burst of zinc ions, flashing light at the origin of human life, this core holds the first flicker of becoming. This is the threshold where potential becomes a pattern, where formlessness begins to take form.

    The Eye of Time (left) opens perception beyond chronological sequence. Time folds here into what physicists call "block universe" — past, present, and future existing as accessible coordinates rather than sequential events.

  • The circular form is fundamental to my practice. Each painting is intended as a concentrated energy field, a vortex where the fundamental oscillations of existence can gather, focus, and transform consciousness. Each stroke in every painting is counted, each hundred is marked down around the canvas stretcher. Counting ritual is a rhythmic brainwave entrainment: away from chaotic thinking and into coherence.

    To converge is not to arrive somewhere else, but to remember we are already everything, everywhere, all at once. The door is right there and we are both the seeker and the infinite space being sought.

Audio Experience >>

Gravitational Pull and Harmonics of the Threshold

Inspired by Astrology and the Wheel of Dharma philosophy

  • This installation is intended as a metaphysical orrery — eight planetary entities orbit around a central polarity: radiant Sun and luminous Moon generating the primary field of light and shadow, action and reflection.

    The eight surrounding paintings are planetary in essence, but not astronomically specific. These are vibrational portraits of archetypal forces that have shaped human understanding of our universe. Each planet here represents not a celestial body but a fundamental pattern of experience — communication (Mercury), love (Venus), action (Mars), expansion (Jupiter), structure (Saturn), innovation (Uranus), dreams (Neptune), grounding (Earth).

  • Astrology here is a language of resonance rather than fate. These planetary forces have been mapped across cultures and spiritual frameworks because they echo within human consciousness. Each archetype corresponds to patterns we embody: how we love, how we create boundaries, how we expand our vision, how we navigate change. Moving through them consciously means integrating the layers of identity into a whole self.

    The eightfold structure creates a wheel of evolution. Like the turning of the Dharma Wheel, each completion of the circuit opens the next level of understanding. This motion is a spiral, not a closed loop: the rhythm repeats yet never in an identical way. Each revolution through the planetary cycle shifts frequency, deepens awareness, reveals new dimensions of the same eternal patterns. These harmonics are not doors for escape, but pathways for exploration.

  • Through my Temporal Psychoexpression practice, each painting captures the vibrational signature of its archetypal force. The counted strokes flowing around circular shapes are designed to be meditation devices. Gravitational Pull, the painting in the center, is the invisible force of awareness that holds the system together. It is the observer, the still point around which perception, discipline, and desire revolve.

    This installation is intended as a gateway into pattern recognition, conscious evolution, and remembering your orbit within a greater design.

Audio Experience >>

The Heartbeat of Remembering

Inspired by Schumann's Resonance and non-dual Eastern thought traditions

  • This sculptural diptych captures a moment of suspension — two hemispheres held apart by an invisible interval. The larger form evokes the upper atmosphere, the realm of mind and cosmos, while the smaller half-sphere below grounds us in matter and origin. But the true subject of this work is neither form — it is the space between them.

    This gap echoes Earth's own resonant cavity, the electromagnetic field between crust and ionosphere that gives rise to the Schumann Resonance. At 7.83 Hz, this planetary pulse synchronizes with human brainwaves, creating a bridge between terrestrial and consciousness frequencies.

  • The interval between the two forms represents what non-dual Eastern philosophy traditions call the "gap between thoughts" — the luminous pause where awareness recognizes itself. In Dzogchen practice, this is rigpa, the spacious clarity behind all phenomena. In Advaita Vedanta, it is the unchanging witness that perceives the coming and going of mental activity. Neuroscience reveals this as the theta-alpha state where self-referential thought quiets and consciousness expands beyond personal boundaries.

    Just as the Schumann cavity requires emptiness to resonate, consciousness requires stillness to remember its true nature. The gap is the space for potential — the fertile void where creativity, intuition, and recognition arise. This is where the door has always been: not in the content of experience, but in the space that holds it all.

  • The door is right there — in the pause between breath and breath, thought and thought, earth and sky. This diptych is as a map fragment and navigational tool, inviting viewers to feel the resonance that connects planetary frequencies with the deepest rhythms of consciousness.

    The work is a reminder: what we seek is not somewhere else but in the vibrating stillness we are already immersed in. The heartbeat of remembering is the recognition that separation itself is an illusion.

Audio Experience >>

Snakes and Ladders

Inspired by Kabbalah Tree of Life and Leela, the Game of Self-Knowledge

  • Ten mandala-shaped artworks spread across the wall, arranged in the ancient geometry of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. I transformed each sephira in the Tree into a portal of dense, coiling energy. These serpentine forms twist inward and outward simultaneously, embodying the paradox of consciousness descending into matter while eternally seeking return to source.

  • The composition is intended as a cosmic gameboard.

    Snakes and Ladders draws its name from the Indian spiritual game of Leela, where every square on the gameboard represents a state of consciousness.

    Players navigate karma, illusion, insight, and grace — ascending ladders of realization or sliding down snakes of attachment. I saw a connection between the Tree of Life dynamics and the Leela gameboard; they both symbolize a living field of movement, a choreography where initiation, misstep, and cosmic humor dance together.

    The snake symbolism here is not of wisdom or temptation, but of the very motion of awareness itself — the serpentine current that weaves through cycles of forgetting and remembering. Though I worked on paper, in smaller size and simplified watercolor technique, my Temporal Psychoexpression practice still holds strong presence in the series: small sharp gel pen strokes create flows and mark the undulating rhythm, mapping the spiraling journey consciousness takes through its own becoming.

  • Kabbalah and Leela share essential wisdom: both offer maps of transformation. One speaks in divine emanations and archetypal forces, the other in karmic cause and consequence. Both reveal life not as linear progression but as spiraling ascent punctuated by sudden illumination or unexpected descent. Both suggest a deeper intelligence at play — something watching, guiding, or perhaps simply delighting in the cosmic game.

    At the installation's base, a hopscotch grid outlined directly on the floor invites viewers to step in and jump towards Enlightenment. This little game (or ritual?) is a reminder that the way out is neither up nor down, but through.

    The door is always there, waiting for us to open it and go play.

Audio Experience >>

Tris McCall at Eye Level Blog

“…This is not meditation, nor is it prayer. It’s an artistic expression of an idea — one that begins deep in the body on the day we realize our heartbeats are numbered, and continues as we watch the slow sweep of the sun across the sky and the inexorable crawl of the hands across the clockface.”

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