“Inside Out — Snail Mail (USPS)” is an oil painting centered on institutional erosion and rendered in the same surrealist realist vocabulary that runs through the Inside Out series. At the center of the composition stands a USPS letter box, its blue body marked by damage that is targeted rather than general: the American eagle logo torn, and its locked compartment visibly dented — signs of repeated attempts to force it open, and yet it holds, closed and intact despite the assault.

Weathered harbor piles rise around it, the same navigational infrastructure that runs through the series, doing their job of marking and orienting while the wreckage gathers around them.

Pigeons gather in and around the scene, perched at different distances from the box. Two break from the series’ consistent rule that its birds witness but never acknowledge being watched: one in the foreground, closest to the viewer, and another at the left, both turning to look directly out of the canvas. The gaze implicates. It asks the viewer to account for their own distance from what is happening to the box.

The letter box’s own contents — envelopes, parcels, everything it exists to hold and protect — spill out and around it, threatening to bury the box beneath the sheer volume of what it was never given the resources to manage. Snail Mail (USPS) was painted during a period of sustained pressure on the postal service — an agency chronically undervalued for the scale and reach of what it quietly accomplishes, now facing an administration actively working to undermine it under the banner of cutting government waste. The dent in its locked compartment is the mark of that pressure: forced, tested, repeatedly struck — but still holding.

Paired with its companion piece, Snail Mail (Canada Post), this work asks what happens when the systems built to connect us come apart — not always through the same failure, but always at the cost of what depended on them.

Rev. 07/2026