When Sigmund Freud offered Rainer Maria Rilke psychotherapy, the Czech poet protested, “don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee, too.”
[Shadows, duplicity, and parallels]
A photon is as a packet of energy, a particle of light. From this definition, I consider light the purest form of energy. If light is at the uppermost reaches of the visible spectrum, then dark dwells at the opposing end—established by the furthest iteration of light: the shadows it casts. Endless layers in between make up forms, reflections, mirages, and ghosts. I explore this spectrum in art, peeling away parallel visions and investigating the space from either end. The act of living, of consciousness, of perceiving, is being in between. In death, we pass through the edges of this spectrum. In birth, again, we move from one end to the other, and life replicates itself in that space between for millions of paces, an endless loop, which constitutes computer programs and animates the organic world. A caterpillar, going through metamorphic stages, seals itself within its special container—the chrysalis. Within this place, its body is liquefied, its cells rearrange, and its form is regenerated—a structural butterfly waits to emerge. Experiments have proven that in this passage, memory is retained: a caterpillar who hates the smell of tulips at birth will, in its winged stage, still feel ire at the scent. There is some consciousness retained between these spaces, like a gene passed over time, ancestral remnants reaching down, down, and, if quantum physics leads us anywhere, around. This carousel, a pattern changing minutely, directionally, through hundreds of patient, individual, iterations, is evolution, it is life, it is where I find art. The passages I record candidly are stills through time, merged space between layers, a vision forged from a small patch intended to indicate the whole. Media is irrelevant—photos, collages, video, painting, drawing, coding—all accept marks needed to drive pattern, which brings relief in its repetition, bordering up subjects, taking them from their slice of present time to be expanded into a fuller dimension, paneled away in a page of my idiosyncratic scrapbook. It relies on observation: the rise and fall of a flank, the responsive flick of an ear, the curled lips of emotion, the skin that tenderly sheaths gore and bone. The fragility of the body released to its senses, encompassed by the environment: the world around the body, and the subject’s sensual perception, the smells and sights, bumps and prickles, the physical jars and mental ones: the human experience is the recording of these moments in memory, a reflective asset which recalls old pains, pleasures, and stirs both nostalgia for the past and plans and hopes, changes and resolves, thinking forward to the future and admonishing the present. But in observation, the careful cult of my creation, the present is the fruitful, riveting pulse from which to take my queues. In New York I have family, reminders of the roots which twine our lives together; yet I feel numbed and covered in coats, living amid dreary, washed colors and acrid scents which stifle more than stimulate. To feel it all allows me to get a true sense of my perspective, so that I may document some display of the fleeting, hardening the temporary into a fertile memory.
I long to expose a vibrant inner core that tightly ties together the masses, rather than the convoluted, constructed jigsaw pieces our current culture compartmentalizes as deprived concepts, regulated by simplified schemata.
Perspective changes perception & vice versa
Shadows/Parallels:
Why do we call it the reptilian brain? Reaching far back into the depths of our instincts, which we have been taught to trust. Yet we dont.
[Paramecium video]
Clearly instincts are innate for a reason> tons of experience over time
research methods:
READINGS:
cultural lives of whales & Dolphins
Joseph Campbell the power of myth
WATCHING:
Killers in Eden
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:
dream journals
thin film interference
PHYSICAL EXPERIMENTS:
non newtonian fluids, sodium acetate, ferrofluid
How might one make an argument with a work of art/design
- What does the object, process, methodology say about the work
installation creates a literal environment which physically metaphors dream states, parallelisms, through underwater/aquatic life imagery. Invokes (hopefully) curiosity, compassion, contemplation, respect.
Neo Primal Sci Fi
The process combines science and art, shadows of each other (obviously any generalization of art is a generalization & there are tons of exceptions> art provokes questions, science attempt to answer them.)
Nature and science embark on a similar search for answers but ask different questions: art—those that have no definite answer, science, those whose answers we can define.
We must acknowledge the in between areas of the dividing spectrum between art & science, or in this case nature and technology.
