SMILEY: Lost In My Own Universe

SMILEY: Lost in My Own Universe

This exhibition is really a map of what’s been going on inside my head for years.

I’ve always been drawn to memory, especially the strange way certain images, songs, films, characters, places, and emotions stay with us long after the moment itself has passed. Some of them, I don’t quite fully understand myself.

The Smiley Soup Cans started with a very simple idea: I wanted to make people smile and interact with the work. I made my first collection of 32 cans in 2017 for my first solo exhibition. Over the years, they’ve continued to evolve with me. What began as something playful has become another way for me to tell stories—using the characters, images, films, places, and pieces of culture that helped form me and, in many ways, all of us.

Lost in My Own Universe is not meant to be a clean or linear story. It’s a collection of memories, obsessions, characters, mistakes, observations, emotions, and fragments of culture that have somehow become part of who I am.

I hope people find pieces of their own universe somewhere inside it.