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.
