Somewhere between fear and despair, there’s a building. It’s split open for onlookers like a dollhouse or the set of a movie where the camera pans from interior to interior. And it’s black and gray and brown and white, each room filled with nightmarish curls and blobs and swirls that bring to mind fetuses and sperm and bodies. In the middle room on the middle floor, floating above a splotch of white, there’s red—a small scribble, a shock, a frightened knot of scarlet drawing the eye away from the mottle of blacks and browns. To its left is a wardrobe, or maybe it’s a door, arched at the top and decked out in dots and squiggles that give it the look of a two-dimensional jellyfish.

Peering into this abstract townhouse, the fourth wall invisible and the chaos and distress bubbling and eddying and flailing within, the viewer wants to look away, but can’t. What’s inside is disturbing and raw, but also compelling and primal. This is the seething primordial soup organized into a shaky and unstable-looking Victorian dollhouse. And while we’d like to pretend it has nothing to do with us, in it we recognize our own wretched roots.