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The Diabolical is a full-room installation consisting of variously sized monochromatic paintings. Each canvas depicts in impasto the "height lines" most commonly seen at police stations, used to identify and index suspects.  The paintings are hung at wall heights that measure one’s vertical dimensions accurately.  Both canvases and walls are always painted the exact same color. The raised lines and numbers allow the paintings to be repeatedly painted over without losing what is represented - at least until the layers are so numerous and the paint so thick that they are hidden. On the back of the canvases are labeled the “provenance” of paint colors. "Painting over" thus becomes a coy comment on collecting and the futileness of restoration and "touching up.”

When a viewer enters any exhibition space, he or she determines the conditions for looking at art -- how long to look at the work, under what aesthetic criteria, and so on. The Diabolical’s main purpose reverses this “power play.” By simply entering this space, the viewers are literally “watched” and “sized up” (for real, physically), rendered “complicit and criminal” by the paintings.

Lacking this traditional control, the viewer is thereby placed under the work's watchful scrutiny, where looking becomes an act of paranoia, self-incrimination, guilt, and indecency. All attempts at "gazing" (e.g. controlling) are negated and power is usurped by the work itself.