ARTIST STATEMENT, potentially final

Blog Post 9

artist statement

Everything feels fragmented and disjunctive in my space. I have been experiencing this for a while now. Nuances and pall, the detail clearer here than there, all of it organized in a way that looks un-systematic.

I have been alone for a time, seated on a bench in the middle of a gallery, and this is how it feels: that I am sitting as a person does in a mortuary chapel, keeping watch over the body of a relative or a friend.

This is what I’ve done now, concentrating on the differences, arm shirt, unknown object at the edge of the frame, the disparity or uncertainty.

I don’t know if that’s a smile, it could be a smile. Same image three times, maybe smiling, smiling, and probably not smiling. Three fragments.

In the studio I am trying to rearrange the fragments of everything that has fallen apart on me. While occupied by this task, reorganizing the same things over and other again, Yukio Mishima’s imperial hope that divinity might be reached through organization. How does it fit together? Also fix the faults revealed by the initial failure. Not just fix it, make it better.

 

I imagine close my eyes from the images and imagine that Zarathustra and Sisyphus look like almost the same man when you compare their ID photos, I could try to describe the difference in movement through film, but you can really only understand the difference intuitively in three dimensions.

My work exists in a world where maybe the feathers that fall from Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History’s wings turn into flower petals when they hit the threshold of the present, like crepe myrtle or lilacs bunches when the branch is shaken hard with both arms, or maybe confetti.

Or confetti glitter nail polish. Which is on the materials card of my painting. On the ingredients list on the bottle, it says specifically “POLYESTER FLAKE (POLYETHYLENE TEREPHTHALATE), POLYESTER FLAKE”, When I say them out loud, they are jumbled like the nonsense words in said by the Three Witches, the scripted spells in Sabrina, The Teenaged Witch. Cocaine is the only thing I’ve ever seen make anyone’s nose twitch.

There’s a goth-themed ‘ladies (lesbian) night’, at the oldest bear bar, which is advertised as “Witch-Hunt Wednesday” but known colloquially as “Which Cunt on Wednesday?” The bar has been there forever, but moved last spring, when area was recently ‘rediscovered’ by realtors, so the rent was raised and a parking lot planned. The building it was in has probably been demolished by now, but I still have the negatives from the shoot there, and could probably reconstruct a replica fairly accurately, if the right materials were supplied.