The work belongs to the ongoing series titled The Glass Dream Game, in which Ededéen follows a specific process that gives rise to a varied and personal body of work. Each painting begins with a chance selection of six books from the artist’s library, interweaving the disparate references from every subject to create a space of meditation and interdisciplinarity. Intermittently adding and scraping away paint, he performs a kind of excavation, in which disparate elements gradually take shape in our visual field, reflecting the artist’s continued exploration of the unconscious, the workings of human thought and our present cultural moment.

In The Koan is in the Stomach, the Demand is Inconvenient, the painting begins with connections between books such as Wisdom of No Escape by Buddhist teacher Pema Chödron and, comically, even the pregnancy book What to Expect When You’re Expecting. In the course of making the painting, Ededéen struggled with a months-long bacteria-born stomach illness for which he spent a night in the hospital. Thus the meanings of passages from such books change for the artist as his life circumstances change. For Ededéen, The Glass Dream Game itself is a kind of query into mystery and an attempt at integrating art and daily life into a single experience, while creating language to express it. Painting itself, for the artist, is just one aspect of a contemplative life for which all activity aims toward deeper awakening and transformation.