My assemblages interweave undercurrents informed by longstanding fascination with the Macrocosmi Fabrica — the intricate latticework through which existence has been imagined and diagrammed.

Time, myth, and personal history converge in the present, where historical fragments and lived experience remain in active dialogue.

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My studio is filled with 17th-century engravings, apotropaic talismans, vinyl disks, memento mori, and artifacts drawn from disparate cultural histories — not as static relics, but as catalytic material. Drafted into the work, their forms are staged, photographed, tested, and reconfigured, entering new relationships that extend beyond their original contexts.

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Self-portraits surface in these compositions as a subtle, nested presence, functioning less as autobiography than as an internal witness to the image as it unfolds.

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Each tableau evolves through a sustained cycle of staging, layering, painting, collage, erasure, photography, and digital reconstruction. Often unfolding over years, the work moves through successive states until it settles into a charged balance, its sources still visible yet transformed.

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It is not a sober or orderly vision. The work sustains a disciplined intoxication — a tension between memory and rupture, between Mnemosyne and Dionysus — excess contained within deliberate structure.

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The resulting images are constructed fields in which sacred and profane, antique and modern, analog and digital elements remain in active tension. Each composition becomes a site where the underlying latticework stands revealed.

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James Mansour