The public phone booth, where generations have spent hours and small fortunes talking to friends, family and lovers, where tears were shed and laughter echoed, seems to be a curiosity of the past, a ghosted presence in the urban landscape. One of my plans for the future is to re-imagine the phone booth. For now, I present here the best example of a public phone booth's organic role for (and inevitably its integration into) lively subcultures.

Lipstick (acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 40x30) is the first in a series of paintings that question our dependence on objects for validation, attraction, confidence and gender identification. The object is larger than life, because larger than life is the space it occupies in our lives, and the text balances between existential threat and singalong lightness.