Tuesday, January 1, 2008

STATEMENT

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING or A STORY I DO NOT KNOW

In Harriet the Spy, there is a scene where Harriet and her friends, Janie and Sport, visit a fantastic garden that belongs to an artist in New York City. Harriet’s nanny Ole Gully produces a bottle of sparkling cider and proposes a toast: “ Shake it up! Take a sip! and wish for what you want most in the world.” Janie and Sport wish for ambitious life goals in the spirit of “what I want to be when I grow up” and then the bottle comes to Harriet. She shakes the bottle intensely as she shouts “I want to see the whole World, and I want to write down Everything! I want to know Everything!” Janie, Sport, and Ole Gully stare as she chugs the rest of the bottle in a single stroke. Her intensity and excessiveness is striking to an audience no older than ten. I remember thinking to my eight-year-old self that no one, not even the great Harriet the Spy, could know everything. That is impossible.
And yet there are so many things that are deemed impossible for ages and ages until somebody does it. It is always curious when someone breaks a record that the world thought could never be broken, and then all of a sudden, everyone is achieving that previous record, because it is no longer labeled as impossible in the general consciousness of human beings. If we assume that there is this general consciousness that connects all human beings then we must assume that all the information of the world-- from someone’s favorite color to what the Dalai Lama feels when he meditates-- is in this consciousness, and available to the rest of us, if only one knew how to access it.
Maybe this connection is what is called intuition, passion, faith, a hunch, fate, or that feeling of doing something in a daze, in which you barely recognize your decisions until after you’ve made them. It is hard to pinpoint those things with words because it is not a kind knowledge that is learned, but rather a kind of knowledge that is born with, or maybe comes for a certain reason which you may or may not be aware of. In either case, if that state of mind, feeling, moment of genius, or whatever names there are for these occurrences is actually the manifestation of this collective consciousness, then that is what my work as a whole is about.
Perhaps it is true that no one can know everything, and perhaps Socrates was right when he said (roughly) that: wise is the man who knows he knows nothing. But even if this is true I feel like you can feel the existence of everything and intuitively know of its existence. So, I make work that both is and depicts the process of connecting to everything; known and unknown. The wandering girl vanishes and reappears in spaces that are meant to convey a sense of being in between. In between worlds, in between consciousness and unconsciousness, in between unaware and aware, in between the inner and the outer. This body of work in particular has begun to unfold as a narrative that is not yet entirely clear. The images that arise in me lately, all seem to be of moments in which something is about to happen, but I’m not sure what, or something has just happened and the viewer has not only missed it but there is only a vague sense of the event that has just taken place. Despite the incredibly narrative qualities of these images, there is really no plot, no unfolding story and very little connectivity, so for me they are singular moments of something like a dream or meditation that come to me in flashes as though they’ve been remembered but at the same time it’s like they are from some outside source and are simply gifted to me.
There is a way to tap into the collective energy of the universe and my work strives to achieve the feeling of that connection in the viewer by presenting images that are solitary, in transition, silent, mysterious, mythic and unexplained. The girl rushes through landscapes seeking out her life and hopefully finding her way of connecting with the collective unconscious. Every line is a time line, every stroke is a channel of information, every mark a testament to the energy that we create and that keeps us together. This work is about everything at once, everyone at once, and tapping into that infinite resource that is humanity and the human consciousness.