Cupcakes and Canaries

This series is a meditation on privilege, ignorance, vulnerability, courage, and the warnings we choose to hear. Drawing from the phrases “Let them eat cake” and “canaries in the coal mine,” I created a world where pleasure and peril coexist—where sweetness conceals hunger and disease, where beauty distracts from danger and depravity. 

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In these paintings, symbols of excess and spectacle overlay fractured dystopian landscapes. Moving through these scenes are golden canaries: witnesses, messengers, and unsung heroes imploring us to wake up and choose a different path. 

The myth of Marie Antoinette and the words attributed to her have endured because they embody a deeper cultural fear: the moment when privilege becomes so insulating that suffering beyond its walls becomes invisible. In contrast, the canary is small and easily overlooked, yet its sensitivity and vulnerability can make it the first to recognize poisoned air. I see this as a metaphor for our own lives. We often ignore warning signs when acknowledging them would require us to change. We become habituated to the fog and smoke, we normalize the fracture, we continue the indulgence even as the guillotine looms overhead. 

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I am not outside of this contradiction. I, too, can become absorbed by my own needs for comfort, disengagement, and distraction in the face of overwhelming life and world events. These paintings are therefore less an accusation than a mirror, asking what we fail to see—and whose voices we dismiss at our own peril. 

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Against the spectacle, the canary keeps singing. 

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The question is whether we are brave enough to listen.