Created in response to the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd, Binary Opposition investigates the sharp ethical and political fissures that fractured the American conscience during that period—and continue to reverberate today. Drawing from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist theory of opposing forces, the series lays bare the entangled binaries that underlie systems of power: right/wrong, justice/injustice, peace/violence, silence/speech. Protesters marched under the banner of moral urgency and collective grief, only to be met with tear gas, rubber bullets, curfews, and suppression—proof that the state’s idea of “order” is often diametrically opposed to the people’s cry for liberation.

The works oscillate between irony and visceral confrontation. In one moment, the viewer is seduced by visual tropes familiar to propaganda or advertising; in the next, they’re jarred by unsettling imagery that interrupts any sense of comfort. This tension—between the polished and the raw, the familiar and the violent—mirrors the impossible choices faced by those in the streets: to risk safety in the name of justice, or to remain silent in complicity.

What Binary Opposition asks us to confront is not only the contradiction between morality and law, but the fabrication of that contradiction itself. The series gestures toward a deeper structural reality: that the categories through which we understand “justice” have been historically shaped by systems designed to exclude, control, and punish. Protesters were not simply pushing back against an isolated injustice, but against a long-embedded architecture of racial capitalism, surveillance, and state control.

This visual archive operates as both document and mirror. It captures the rage and resilience of those who dared to imagine a different world, while reflecting the uncomfortable truth that moral clarity does not guarantee political traction. The protests revealed a binary not just between people and state, but within the self—between one’s ethics and one’s fear, between hope and despair.

Binary Opposition is not a closed argument but an open wound. The works do not resolve the tensions they depict—instead, they ask us to stay with them, to resist the urge for easy resolution. The grief is unresolved. The violence is ongoing. The binary still stands.

Yet in this confrontation, there is also movement. Resistance is never static. The series suggests that perhaps the binary itself—so central to Lévi-Strauss’s thinking—is not permanent but permeable. In the streets, and in these images, we witness the attempt to move beyond opposition into solidarity, beyond fracture into synthesis, beyond oppression into possibility.