I wake up in a zoo.
I
Once, when I was a child, I awoke from an inexplicable dream that has remained with me throughout my life.
In the dream I am in a huge room, as tall as a cathedral. On one side there is a giant ogre and on the other side, at the base of a high wall, a single mouse hole. In the dream I watch as the giant crosses the enormous room, steps inside the mouse hole, and vanishes.
This scene repeats, over and over: the giant steps inside the little hole as easily as I might step into a bedroom though he does not shrink and the hole does not become larger.
Even now, I can see that it happens yet I cannot explain how it happens and I cannot understand why.
II
I paint mixed media poems about real and abstracted experience. [1]
Choices of imagery and mark-making reflect competing instincts for rational and impulsive responses to a constellation of ambiguous threats, social queues, and targeted marketing.
My paintings explore the isolation of social media. They use traditional materials to explode digital ideas. They assume a post-technical future in which the painting exists as a coded history.
Now, they are a prediction. This is what they predict:
the.future <- the.past %>%
mutate(you=ifelse(is.na(the.individual),”exalted”, “obliterated”)) %>%
distinct()
Aliens did not build the pyramids. The pyramids were built by thousands of hardworking people, no different than people today.[2]
Behold what people can accomplish when they work together.[3]
The only thing that separates us is time.
Hold on, there’s a rat in my office.
…
Ok, I’m back.
My paintings are invisible.
The actual paintings can never be seen by anyone but me. Each one exists on a continuum in time as a series of separate incremental paintings (hundreds, thousands), each version abandoned and replaced, gambled for some new iteration that may or may not have been better than the one before.
My paintings tally loss and the machinery of isolation: categories, definitions, walls, time, distance, experience, dread, dark matter, likes, religion, bureaucracy, chemistry, sex, motes, humility, pants, oaths, drugs, contagions, magnetism, ladders, death, mobile phones, chairs, and memory. There are others.
They plot the geography of smoke and the boundaries of ice flows: The real and the unreal, the reflective and the expressive, the impossible and the (obviously) possible.
They expect that the devices of isolation become the joints and hinges that bind the very things they isolate.
They consider things that exist only in relation to each other and for the sake of the other; Mountains and valleys, days and nights, symmetry and asymmetry, heartbreak and humor, scissors – And that what is bound is not all together or all the same.
They isolate meaning and are the props for meaning.
They are each a context for the other.
They are a cypher and the cypher key.
They recall a time and a moment in time.
They corral how it feels.
Each one is a failure.
III
My paintings are the husk of a process, a broken clock that tells what time the world ended.
My process is a void in a tapestry of processes.
The void is only relevant because it cannot be skipped. It is the means by which the work is revealed. The void could be automated or outsourced or collapsed to a billionth of a second. But it cannot not-exist. And it cannot help but reveal something.
I draw a circle and step inside. I make a mark, I pick up a lamp and rub. A genie always emerges and always grants the same wish:
Make me wild.
IV
Science is a sense-making system.
Science reveals things to us that are contrary to everything we can experience:
That there are no straight lines or solid objects.
That our eyes see upside down.
That dog whistles and ultraviolet light exist.
That our entire lives span three sparking pounds, isolated within a vault of complete darkness.
V
Art-making is a sense-making system.
My system is intentional and referential: In time, the work refers to itself and as it does the subject becomes the result.
The brain needs something to dream. In a void it will dream itself. It will name itself. It will let go of the edge in the middle of the night and drift away and sing itself.
People don’t come from nowhere.
————
[1] Human memory does not provide an accurate recording of what a person saw and heard but a biased abstract of what the person believes they experienced. These experiences (in concert with an orchestra of anatomical, cognitive, and environmental factors) serve to inform concepts of self, perceptions of the world, and expectations of the future. For more on current theories of human cognition see Ananthaswamy, Anil. 2015. The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations Into the Strange New Science of the Self. New York: Dutton.
[2] There is no significant biological difference between ancient and modern Egyptian populations. Even their stature (height) is similar, which is surprising as height tends to increase in modern populations as a result of improved nutrition and living conditions. More on stature of ancient and modern Egyptians: Zakrzewski, S. R. (2003), Variation in ancient Egyptian stature and body proportions. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol., 121: 219–229. doi:10.1002/ajpa.10223
[3] See also, Great Wall of China, Stone Henge, Easter Island, Tikal, etc. For additional context on Easter Island and Tikal: Diamond, Jared M. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. Print.