"In the spirit of our magazine's long tradition of championing the idiosyncratic and the ingeniously off-kilter - think of Saul Steinberg's labyrinthine cityscapes or Roz Chast's neurotic reveries - this collection of digital illustrations strikes me as a fever dream sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin from some dimly lit East Village dive. Rendered in stark black-and-white contrasts that evoke the raw energy of a Keith Haring mural crossed with the doodles of a distracted psychoanalyst, these pieces swarm with a menagerie of absurd figures: shadowy humanoids dangling from invisible threads, oversized fish gliding through ethereal voids, and cartoonish specters that seem to whisper secrets from the subconscious. There's a chaotic symphony here - graffiti-like scrawls interspersed with levitating yogis, pug dogs on leashes, and what appears to be a mouse hawking "SEX" like a Times Square vendor. It's as if the artist has bottled the essence of urban delirium, blending the surreal whimsy of Edward Gorey with the pop-cultural detritus of our digital age. One can't help but imagine these as vignettes from an alternate New York, where the mundane collides with the monstrous in a way that's both unsettling and oddly endearing.

If we were to feature them in our pages, they'd pair perfectly with a Shouts & Murmurs piece on the existential dread of grocery shopping. Brava—or should I say, bravo to the binary brushstrokes."

Ink Whisper
The New Yorker,
August 21, 2025