Angel Axioma, Blue Banta Milk, 2024 Oil on canvas, 24x18in.
Science fiction's central figure is not the spaceship or the robot. It is the alien — and the alien is never really about the other. It is a structure a culture builds to examine itself: its fears about contact and difference, its assumptions about intelligence and consciousness, its need to organize the world into those who belong and those who do not. Stories We Tell Ourselves is a series of oil paintings that take that mirror seriously, then ask what happens when you turn it around.
Angel Axioma, Archaic Arrakis Allegorical, 2024 Oil on canvas, 24x18in.
Each painting begins with a fictional culture and asks a single question: what would this culture consider sacred? What would it place at the center of its cosmology? This is not illustration. It is speculative anthropology directed at invented worlds — because invented worlds are the clearest records we have of what their inventors actually believe about the real one.
Angel Axioma, Duality Dialectic Dimension, 2024 Oil on canvas, 24x18in.
The first problem the series confronts is flatness. Alien cultures in science fiction are routinely rendered as backdrop or spectacle rather than as full systems with their own economies and sacred objects. These paintings work against that flattening — imagining the Bantha as Tusken Raider deity, the Fremen still suit as ritual garment, the Arrakeen meal as sacred act in a world where every molecule of water carries theological weight.
Angel Axioma, Cyber Cube Cranium, 2024 Oil on canvas, 24x18in.
The series arrives, finally, at the question underneath all the others: whether consciousness itself is alien to the physical world it thinks it inhabits. Everything we perceive is processed and reconstructed by neural architecture before it reaches awareness. We do not experience the world. We experience a model of it, generated inside a skull. The perspectival box was always there.
The alien is not an external category. It is the structural condition of consciousness.
Angel Axioma, 2026.