Kept
A painting can hang on a wall for three hundred years.
A prayer — the most direct, personal address a human being ever makes — gets thrown away or forgotten within the week.
KEPT is a conceptual art practice built on that contradiction.
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KEPT — field installation. Paintings in production. Documentation released in coordination with exhibiting institutions.
Status
No paintings are publicly released at this stage. Public documentation is intentionally limited ahead of first exhibition and representation conversations. A private preview dossier and studio visits are available to galleries, curators, and collectors by request.
About The Work
We have decided, culturally, that a painting is worth preserving. Worth framing. Worth passing to the next generation.
We have decided, just as firmly, that a prayer is not.
KEPT holds those two decisions next to each other and doesn't look away. Opted-in handwritten prayers and requests — gathered through cross installations across churches, farms, prisons, public spaces, and international sites — are translated into monumental acrylic-on-raw-linen paintings. Reproduced exactly as written. Misspellings intact. Nothing corrected. Each painting is 8 x 4 feet — the exact dimensions of the cross it came from. The tag, the cross, the painting: the same object at three scales. The original handwritten tag remains with the painting as source artifact and provenance.
The handwriting is treated as evidence — pressure, spacing, hesitation, omission. A trace of a specific person at a specific threshold, leaving language behind as proof of need. What changes is not the text but the conditions of encounter: scale, duration, material, and visibility.
Enlarged and held on raw linen, a private act of address becomes a public fact. In front of the work, reading becomes participation. The viewer inherits something they didn't ask for — a stranger's petition, held now by someone the writer will never meet.
KEPT does not rescue these words. It proceeds from the premise that they were already received — and asks what it means when we receive them too.
Method
KEPT is a practice with fixed constraints.
Field deployment Prayers are gathered wherever cross installations are hosted — churches, correctional facilities, farms, public spaces, and international contexts — through a consistent participation protocol. The field apparatus is not exhibited.
Explicit consent (opt-in) Only prayers with explicit permission are eligible to be displayed, documented, reproduced, or translated into paintings. If permission is not granted, the writing is not used — in any form, for any purpose. No names are requested; participants are asked not to include personal identifiers. No attempt is made to determine who wrote any prayer. High-vulnerability sites are approached with additional care and host requirements.
Preservation Each opted-in tag is kept exactly as written. The material record remains intact.
Translation — no edits A curated selection is enlarged faithfully into paintings — acrylic on raw linen, 8 x 4 feet, the exact dimensions of the cross. Spelling, grammar, spacing, line breaks, and ink color remain exactly as written.
Presentation The work is presented as monumental paintings. A curated archive component may accompany exhibitions depending on context. The cross remains a field collection apparatus and is not exhibited. When a prayer becomes a painting, the original tag stays with it — permanently.
Release Structure
KEPT is issued in defined production cycles — each a finite release of 15–20 unique linen works, with the total number set before release. All works are unique (1/1). No editions. No variants of the same tag. The original handwritten tag remains with the painting as an integral element through all exhibition, acquisition, and resale.
Full production and release details available to galleries, institutions, and serious collectors upon request.
Inquiries
For exhibition inquiries, institutional collaborations, press, studio visits, or private preview requests:
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