ART.

PAINTING.

THE BONES ARE DIFFERENT NOW.

DECEMBER 2021.

ACRYLIC PAINT ON SKIN.
DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS.

when i run my worn down fingertips across the smooth, pink, prophetic scars on both of my knees,

i’m reminded of the falls, the tears, the leaps of faith, the crashes into doubt that gave me them, forever marked, irrevocably so

the body, and it’s bones

seem different now

is it still mine?

the mind has colored them blue, and orange, and pink, and red. the mind has pushed each bone, each blood vessel, each nerve to the end of the world. and reaching them seems different now.

when i made those mistakes that gave me those scars, i know i would have wished my bones to be colorful, shiny, soft, beautiful. i may have even thought that they were. who can tell?

now, though

can’t they just be bones?

the mind, not mine, sends a signal to a body, mine neither, a body who already has a mind of its own. it will not be reached in this realm of absurdity. it’s bones have grown — or regressed, i’m not sure — into something i had once wished, but now never would wish again.

is it my body? i know that it is, but it can’t be.

the bones are different now.

DRAWING.

BATHROOM.

COMPRESSED + VINE CHARCOAL, 36" x 48".

MAY 2022.

It’s unsettling seeing a two dimensional room. The walls, the floor, the furniture, the emptiness; they’re all the right size, but something remains wrong. The word room implies space, implies capacity, implies distance. So how do you flatten a room into a drawing? This dilemma reminds me of René Magritte’s absolutely insufferable painting of a pipe, under which is written “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” It is a painting of a pipe. I really cannot argue with that. But with rooms -- fully life sized, semi-realistically drawn or painted rooms -- something changes. Dominique Fung’s paintings of rooms, more specifically bathrooms, left me dumbfounded and derealized, detached. There was something about the intense awareness that rooms exist without us in them -- and that we will never know what happens while we’re not there -- that made me question existence even more fervently than I already do. I was disturbed by the way that the water in her receptacles was entirely still; by the way that it was colored a bubblegum pink, when water isn’t really colored at all; by the way that her people and animals looked fake, or dead, or on the brink of either. I chose a reference photo from an architectural design studio (Of Prairies) that mimicked this kind of deception. I was irritated by how a photo of a mirror was taken without anyone or anything in the reflection, by how manicured and how performed the space became in this photo. Fung creates an effect similar to the breathy impressionism of Edgar Degas in his drawings of dancers -- even though the styles themselves are so very different. There is something missing, something not quite translated with just paint or just charcoal, but I am glad of it. To heighten this sense of almost dreamy discordance, my translation of the photo is presented at an extreme convex angle. This is not a room; it’s a drawing and an interpretation and a distortion of a room. I don’t know what happens to rooms when we are not there; but isn’t it odd to look at rooms that aren’t there when we are? Maybe they become two dimensional when there is no one to fill the three dimensional space. Probably not.