Duke Windsor

Duke, in your Golden Skies series, gold leaf operates less as ornament than as a destabilizing agent within the pictorial field; how do you reconcile its historical function as a transcendental ground, as seen in Byzantine iconography, with your insistence on embedding it within the contingencies of contemporary urban and vernacular space?
“Gold has always carried the weight of transcendence, and I don’t reject that history; I rely on it. In Byzantine iconography, gold functions as an eternal ground, a space outside of time where the divine is made visible. What interests me is what happens when that same material is pulled out of a purely sacred context and reinserted into lived, imperfect, contemporary space. In Golden Skies, I’m not trying to recreate transcendence as something distant or untouchable; I’m trying to test it against the everyday.