Lazarus Ball

Lazarus Ball (2024–2026)

Corruption as cause of death is examined in this body of work.

Lazarus Ball is the culmination of two years of painting made under considerable pressure.  What started as a short series called Grief and Ghosts in 2024, evolved into a body of work that is now structured as four books — Book of the Heart, Book of the Dead, Book of the Sky, Book of the Night. The series moves across registers of grief, witness, mass surveillance and oppression.

The Book of the Heart began as a response to personal grief and the powerlessness that I felt in trying to navigate an impossible and corrupt medical system. In late 2024, I encountered the Egyptian Book of the Dead. As I poured through the text and all of the rich iconographic imagery, I started to draw parallels between the plight of the people in war torn Gaza, the Afterlife and the central figures in the Netherworld. 

The Book of the Dead holds Gaza: two years of unrelenting bombing, starvation, and the systematic targeting of civilians, hospitals, schools and civil systems while people in power enabled unprecedented obliteration with their silence.

The Book of the Sky considers the rapid adaptation of AI. It posits that global society was not given a choice in this evolution of technology as it becomes exceedingly more omniscient and powerful. Today, data centers are popping up all over the United States in places where ordinary people lack the resources to defend themselves against corporate land and water grabs. The mechanisms that kill are the same whether the victim is a child in Gaza, a child on Epstein Island, an elder in a corporate care facility, a young man failed by a captured regulatory system, or a woman named Good who deserved to live.

The Book of the Night maps the mechanisms of blanket systemic oppression using algorithms. It examines the modern systems of techno-fascist surveillance that track our daily lives, police our speech and right to protest thus impinging upon our collective civil liberties.

The Battle of Minneapolis centers on a woman named Good, who was executed in the street after blowing whistles and attempting to drive away from an officer—and all of the bureaucratic agencies that our country has become that enable such impunity.

The Complicit reveals a group of powerful people with dollar signs for eyes and X’s over their mouths that bought their silence.

Kompromat confronts the hierarchy of power that makes complicity possible —blackmail, predators in paradise, the voiceless children, the handpicked politicians that look the other way. The colors intentionally chosen to mirror happy and carefree island life, the innocents and the predators lying in wait.

Lazarus Ball is a response to what corruption has done— to a family, to a people, to a planet by systems that depend upon silence to exist.

It is grief that refused complicity and asked to become something and an insistence that the dead be seen and the living be held accountable.

Macaulay Woods, July, 2026