WILLOWS: tell us about you, and your relationship to making, creating, or finding your way through expression. in your current craft, how did you get started?

DYLAN: i have been drawing my whole life, and i was always interested in compositions that had a lot of things going on inside them. i think i would see a piece of paper like a fish tank or ant hill; it was a box that i needed to fill with things that i initially selected, but then would inevitably take on a life and direction of their own once they all started interacting with each other. it has always been hard for me to make work that just has one subject, which maybe is an adhd thing. 

i have a drawing that i made when i was two years old that is just a giant blob surrounded by dots, with little lines connecting a bunch of elements together, and i realized that it’s still a pretty useful abstraction of the way i make work now; a large ecosystem, which is also often a character, a bunch of tiny characters, and then all the infrastructure that the tiny characters use to orga ize and make sense of their environment. so i still draw the same way i did when i was two, just better, i hope.

the clay i use is sculpey, it's a synthetic oven bake clay that i have also used forever but just recently started pressing onto paper and other surfaces to make my paintings more dynamic. before i used sculpey i would mush up the wax from velveeta cheese, which is how i built most of my early muscle memory in the medium.

WILLOWS: what was your process in making this piece? what are your inspirations? how long did it take you? how many iterations did you go through? 

DYLAN: i started this piece in december 2024 and then forgot about it until march 2025, and finished it this july. i usually have a lot of projects all happening at once that i put down then pick back up, so it’s always a bit difficult to create a clear timeline in my head. 

i started by carving two small holes in a piece of plywood, then i glued a sheet of arches paper to the wood and started painting. i am always inspired by heironymous bosch, and i think i ripped off the composition of guernica a little bit, which i do a lot actually because i love the way that painting is laid out. i usually do not do a lot of detailed planning for pieces, i will write out a (very) short story for a piece, make a few layout sketches, and then start. this is the first painting that i have made where i used masking fluid, which allowed me to get a much smoother background color, and now i am obsessed with masking fluid. i also feel like i’m getting to a satisfying place in my paintings with the incorporation of clay relief sculpture, so that was a big focus for this work. eventually, i want to make a frame for the work with a cnc router that also resembles a network of anthills, and has a natural finish and maybe even small clay ants if it doesn’t take away too much from the painting. 

WILLOWS: what else are you working on? where would you like to go in the future of your craft(s)?

DYLAN: right now i am helping to design a haunted house for the elysian theater with the collective freak nature puppets. i have to make 6 floating heads and a bunch of rc car rats among other things. that installation will be up on october 13th and 15th, and may have a second iteration later that month at non plus ultra in lincoln heights. in general i have had a lot of fun this last month learning led circuits and am working on a series of helmets with button activated led communication lights that i want to use as part of a performance/event called nylid game night, where a group of alien beings called nylids, as it sounds, host a game night. and i have to finish my incense landscape/tick tack toe board for this game night. and i want to finish my giant squid painting before 2026, though that may be more than i can bite off. it’s really big.

WILLOWS: your work is set in a universe you created wherein capitalism and overconsumption still exists. why did you choose to employ the use of a separate reality to explore our own? 

DYLAN: i really like the freedom of creating a fantasy world, whether it’s on paper, in video, clay etc because you have a lot less constraints. this is also the type of work i was originally drawn to as a kid, so it’s always come to me more naturally than strict realism. at the same time i start to feel aimless with a piece, particularly a drawing or painting, if it doesn’t contain references to real world things. i feel like i’m still working through the relationship that i want my work to have with the real world, and it’s an exciting problem to have. a fantasy artist that i really admire is ursula k leguin, the science fiction writer, because i think she does a really good job of creating wild fantastical environments that also have very clear real world allegories. her books i think are more focused and overtly political than my work, but i still use her as a reference a lot. i have been thinking of the relationship between the real world and my fantasy realms like the relationship between bone and skin; without the real world underneath, the fantasy world is just a messy, fleshy blob. the less plausible and more chaotic these fantasy worlds become the more i wish they were real. part of the reason i began incorporating relief sculpture into my paintings is because of my frustration that the paintings weren’t actually alive; maybe if the snake is actually 3d and jumps off the page, it becomes more alive? i think a lot about how fantasy being a “method” for exploring our own reality is just adding a redundant step, because to get to the truth you’ll have to end up translating the fantastical elements back into the real. i guess if i just wanted to look at the real i would have become a journalist? so i think i’m doing something else. i like to think i’m still searching for truth, but it’s a different type of truth than a journalist or detective is looking for. something that i like to do with separate realities is reimagine systems and their components as different types of matter that have been stripped of their political weight (though probably not entirely) and instead have more mundane ecosystemic importance. for example, in my last piece for willows i imagined a village that was physically constructing a shared narrative for its people, the same way that humans do with their own history, but the form in which they were doing it was more literal; they were actually building and maintaining a giant version of themselves that they attended to like a garden. in the same way, the ants are engaging in class warfare, but they don’t really care about any of that. they’re just hungry. i’m not really sure what the utility of doing this kind of thing is, but it’s been an exciting route to explore for sure. and yes capitalism and overconsumption still exist in this world, but that’s just because the ants haven’t finished eating that stuff yet. maybe i’ll make a new piece soon where the ants have left, and we can see what happens in the aftermath.

WILLOWS: you chose to integrate specific people’s faces and material things in this work. why did you select these specific people?

DYLAN: none of the people depicted in the painting are actually real people, as that would imply that i want to harm real people so that is not what is happening here. but if they were real people then they were selected pretty randomly, because the ants themselves don’t really care much about the differences between all these (not real) hyper wealthy individuals. when these people plunder the earth of all its resources they are not thinking much about the impact it will have on the rest of us, so i deliberately did not put much time into deciding which people the ants were going to eat. for the ants, it’s like deciding between different pieces of orange chicken. maybe you start with a particularly delicious looking and large piece, but it’s not ultimately a very important decision because it’s all going into your belly.