Abdella uses sculptural interventions that extend his paintings, both outward into the physical space of the viewer and deeper into the world of the painting. “The art I’ve been working on, as of late, walks this tightrope between sculpture, painting, and assemblage, just merging everything together,” says the artist. Abdella employs a variety of found materials in his practice, collecting commercial objects from eBay and junk stores to employ in his works, and devising new techniques to integrate them into painting. In Home Is Where The Heart Is (2023), Abdella paints a bare chest with a square section of the wood panel removed, revealing a sculpted ribcage encasing a dollhouse and a fake beating heart powered by a servo motor inside. Abdella brings the image into the space of the viewer in other works, like Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds (2023), which features a three-dimensional holographic fan that adds an artificial glint to the tine of a fork as it pierces a slice of cherry pie. The artist’s painting of four figures playing in the snow, Snow Day (2023), sits in a diorama of a bird’s nest in the branches of a tree, while ventilation fans blow tissue paper simulating snow. Through his unique approach, Abdella is able to explore tensions between surface and interiority, illusion and reality, and painting and sculpture. 

Across his body of work, the artist references images and aesthetics from middle-class American culture, complicating idealistic visions of America. “When I’m thinking about work,” says Abdella, “I really think about balance, like looking for this duality that’s kind of sweet and disgusting.” To achieve this balance, the artist draws inspiration from varied sources, including amusement parks, his childhood in 1990s West Virginia, American films and cartoons, Norman Rockwell paintings, and Sears catalogs from the 1950s and ‘60s. His painting The Winner Takes It All (2022) depicts a family photo inside a broken frame, which reads “Live Laugh Love.” Here, the adult figures smile with their eyes obscured from view while the expressions of the three children range from detached to angry, with one face rendered in a cartoonish mask of malice. Abdella’s works frequently fuse realism with the cartoonish, as in Playboy (2021) or Temper Tantrum (2020), both of which use detailed renderings of educational settings as backdrops for figures with elongated proportions, sketchy facial features, and elements of collage. Across his practice, Abdella’s work unites varied aesthetics, techniques, and media to depict a failed American Dream, revealing what exists in its place.