WE ARE BORN WITHOUT CONSENT

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A body is given to us. A place, a language, a history already in motion. Some inheritances arrive through presence. Others through absence: through breaks in continuity, origins that stay partly inaccessible.

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Where presence failed to transmit, I looked for the answer elsewhere, and found none waiting there either. Humanity itself was born orphaned of any given reason for its own existence, and raised its own doors in response, one culture after another, rather than inheriting one already standing open.

The Royal Art names one such door, alchemy's word for its own Great Work, reached, in the accounts that describe it, through archetypes, meditation, mantra, a contemplation deep enough to loosen the ordinary edges of a mind. Dream-vision, ecstasy, the handful of states a body enters and cannot fully report back from, each pressing against the same wall, the outer limit of what an ordinary waking mind is built to hold.

 

Through my work, I study why these doors were built, and what their iteration, dressed each time in a different iconography, still reveals about a contemporary humanity, and about a science now finding its own version of the same limit.

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I did not receive one complete symbolic language. I inherited fragments: the Yi Jing, the Tarot, Kabbalah, computation. Some claim them as dogma. I treat them as an archive, entered and recombined, not restored.

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THE ALGORITHM IS A PARABOLA

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I use the algorithm as a figure for the conditions into which we are born, and as the tool through which I think them. An outcome emerges from rules in interaction, in code as in a life. A parabola bends. Its path is shaped by conditions, yet it opens onto positions still to be chosen.

 

To become conscious at the structure acting through us is already to intervene in it. The Yi Jing calls this attention Guān, Viewing: to look long enough at a thing is to be altered by it.

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THE BODY IS THE FIRST MACHINE

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Three dimensions is not a neutral choice of medium. It is mise en abyme, this world nested inside the world of archetypes, an image folded inside the code that renders it. My work moves on two sides of that same fold.

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On one: three dimensional images built from rule and calculation, prints from intimate to monumental scale, animation across screens the size of buildings, spaces built entirely from the work itself. Some of these worlds advance only at the full and new moon: nearly fourteen and a half years to see one in full, a scale of time closer to the celestial than to the human. Time, here, cannot be bought, no more than the body, the family, or the culture we are born into.​

On the other: paint, and sculpture built from my own hair, thirteen years cut and kept. What the body keeps is not the whole of what it carries. What it sheds may hold as much of the story as what remains.

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GOD IS THE ALGORITHM

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God is the name I give to an order beyond the individual. The algorithm is how I parse that order now. Destiny is a structure we encounter, not a sentence. I juxtapose fragments, in image, in paint, in hair, in light, and alter their relations until something else becomes possible. To create may be one of the few ways to answer what we were given, without ever having been asked.