Before New York, before the deadline, there was the prototype.

I built it in my studio, not as a model but as a rehearsal. The idea was already large, already complex, and I knew early on that the installation window at the New Museum would give me very little time. Three weeks. Maybe less. If I hadn’t already worked through the problems in advance—physically, spatially, conceptually—I would fail.

The prototype forced decisions. It answered questions I didn’t yet know how to ask. How narrow could the space be and still feel immersive? How close could the viewer stand before the illusion collapsed? What had to be fixed, and what could remain unstable?

As I built, I had time to think. A lot of time.

I thought about how improbable this moment was. About how far I had come without ever feeling fully authorized to be here. I was proud, genuinely, but that pride was braided tightly with doubt. Not the kind that stops you, but the kind that keeps asking whether you deserve the ground you’re standing on.

I had always believed that if you were going to set goals, you might as well set impossible ones. That belief had carried me a long way, even when I didn’t fully understand why others trusted me or followed my lead. When I asked them later, they talked about enthusiasm—about a kind of optimism that made the future feel reachable—and about vision, about being able to see something clearly enough that others could step into it with me. I didn’t experience that clarity as confidence. It felt more like momentum.

The prototype pulled me back out of my head and into the work; it made the stakes real. It transformed a vision into something measurable, something that could succeed or fail. And once it existed, I could see that the idea held. Not perfectly. Not cleanly. But enough.

Enough to risk New York.