Smart, But Not Applying Himself
Quiz 20 | 32 x 40 inches | Acrylic on paper
What happens when the answer isn’t there, and you try something else.
Remember those pop quizzes… the ones where the teacher would drop one on your desk and you instantly realized you were completely screwed?
There wasn’t really time to think. No time to prepare. Whatever you knew or didn’t was about to show up on paper.
And if you were one of those kids who struggled with that kind of thing, it didn’t come with much explanation. You were distracted. Unmotivated. Not applying yourself. That was the diagnosis.
So if you couldn’t remember how to divide fractions or calculate the cube root of something completely meaningless, you had a choice. Leave it blank… or try something else.
I usually tried something else.
Not because I thought it would work. More like a last attempt to change the outcome. If I couldn’t give the right answer, maybe I could make it interesting. Maybe funny. Maybe enough to get some kind of reaction.
Enough to avoid the F.
It never worked.
But the instinct stuck.
This piece comes from that moment, when the answer isn’t there and you try something else. The wrong thing, technically. But maybe the only thing you actually had.
The quiz itself is rebuilt at a much larger scale and presented like something it was never meant to be, a finished, valuable object. The same bad answers, the same impulse… just surrounded by a gold frame, like it somehow earned it.
Which, in a way, it did.
