The idea for this series emerged from my recovery through various therapeutic modalities to counter chronic sleep and anxiety disorders symptomatic of the major depression I was working with as a fine artist.
My trans-disciplinary practice integrates both eastern and western recovery-based approaches drawn from cognitive and dialectical behaviour psychology such as art therapy, dreamwork, Gestalt therapy, and sleep hygiene, as well as contemplative sciences such as meditation, reiki, and shamanic rituals that unsettle mainstream norms of contemporary art.
I was able to articulate a dialogue between the hermeticism of neo-avantgarde aesthetics with more culturally embodied strategies of creating and experiencing artworks. My work addresses an urgent need in the art world to merge explorations between personal development and avant-gardist aesthetics.
I achieved a significant breakthrough in 2017, when I discovered how to consolidate my studies of psychology and neuroscience with my painting and sculpting practice within different states of conscious awareness—from different stages of restful awareness and sleeping to dreaming. I am able to perceive then examine these artworks which emerge during these states in vivid detail. The challenge then is how to translate the visual texture, compositional dynamics, and dimensional scale of these experiences into physical form.
My research in therapy, rigorous background in classical animation, and avant-garde art practices began to coalesce into new modes of making art. By embodying different states of awareness, I was able to cultivate a virtual laboratory in which new artworks would formulate. My process involves less a subversion of the conscious mind or intentionality than a deep examination of the phenomenological and experiential nature of the different modes of awareness through making art.
I found the first twelve works I produced utilizing this method hearkened back to the original avant-garde with the incorporation of the readymade, serial form, and a flag-oriented resemblance that alludes to the neo-avantgarde practice of circumventing the artist's own subjective input in the creation of art. I realized the bands of simple Gestalt forms and the overall vexillological format of the works also involved how visual attention is augmented through the practice of serial repetition.
The underlying formal structures I am exploring have as much to do with the hypnotic, subliminal, and meditative arrangement of repetitive commodity formulas used in marketing displays and web-based media as they have to do with avant-garde aesthetics and cult images. This tension between visual arrest and scansion within different states of awareness can reveal how the unconscious has been visually colonized by advertising infrastructures redolent of monotonous imagery of the commodity form.
To this end, I have enlisted processes including exhaustive wet sanding, re-sanding, masking, precise tonal variations, and serialized forms through which I encourage the viewer to explore states of awareness that are congruent with those experienced in the creation of the work itself. I see these works both as the diagnosis of a cultural condition, but also a means of exploring new pathways for exercising visual impact and perception.
