Before, Embrace 2022
Sculpture, mixed-media; concrete, plaster, foam, wood and ceramics
Coincidence, Post-post collective, in Studio.151 - https://www.instagram.com/studio.151/
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I have to keep myself from forgetting why.
So I built a shrine filled with the bodies that are drawn by my fear;
This is an illusion;
that one can keep chaos outside.
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Meditations on our collective psychosis; (Are we coping, or living)
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The composition Before, Embrace explores the maladaptive coping mechanism as a form of collective structural disorder - one that attempts to exclude chaos. Placed on an extraordinarily tall table, not for us, in front of us out of reach, lay, crawl, and fold the embodiments of ‘tendencies’ of the mechanism, that is at its core frightened by the unknown.
The sculptures have been somatically composed, working from my body, through body scanning, meditating, internalizing, and externalizing the pressure, the stretching, extending beyond my own.
The composition was inspired by the paintings of operation tables, which idealize modernist reductionism, implying that we can truly know the functioning of our bodies by dissembling the body entirely, dissecting the meat, and deforming the whole. The work is a critique of modern methods of achieving knowledge and categorizing the truth.
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To dine here, the wood has been covered in a shiny light pale green cloth; a detox from our habitual feasting, the meat is not palatable, but convulsive.
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I propose we spend some time here, before we embrace, ingest, and digest our inner conflicts.
