My First Ever Red-Dot

Last night at Its about the Ity,  ‘weight/witness’ sold for $135. Fuck me, the red dot looks almost absurd in its simplicity, like a tiny sun pinned to the wall, but inside me, it shifts my internal ground. It makes me shake my head at how something so small can feel like a doorway opening, and yet that’s exactly what it is, a door I’ve been circling for years, waiting for someone else to turn the key.

It’s not about money. It’s not about success. Those words feel flat here. What I feel is recognition at a depth that cannot be measured. Someone looked at this piece and thought, I need this in my life, not because it’s “good,” not because it completes a collection, not even because it will decorate a wall, but because it already lives inside them, insistent and alive, demanding acknowledgment, urging a home, whispering its presence until it could no longer be ignored. It needed a space, it needed a witness, it needed someone who would hold it in their hands and understand without asking for explanation. And somehow, impossibly, that someone was a student of mine, Peter, someone I have guided, shared space with, shared vision with, and the universe, in all its mysterious choreography, folded that connection into this moment. I never imagined that teaching, that offering small fragments of myself through guidance and observation, could ripple into the act of someone claiming my work, could translate into a recognition so intimate and exact. And yet here it is, undeniable, strange, astonishing, a convergence I could not have scripted.

Being the first red dot gives it a weight I didn’t expect. A seal. A small gold star that never belonged to school. A key turning in a lock I didn’t know had been waiting. It is alignment made visible. It is the end of a chapter written in silence and endurance, the start of one that I cannot yet fully imagine. Not because life has softened, but because something undeniable has arrived.

I am grateful. Grateful for the subtle conversation that this red dot confirms. Grateful that my work can leave me and still carry its essence elsewhere. It is not just a sale. It is not just a dot. It is my tired hands finally getting to stop knocking on life’s door and actually step through into the next metaphysical room. It is a reminder that the intents we cast out, the teachings we think vanish into emptiness, may return in ways we could never foresee, carrying weight, carrying witness, carrying the exact energy of what needed to be recognized.