seeing is a rotten fruit
Bard MFA Thesis, 2022
Red Hook, NY
seeing is a rotten fruit, visualizes inaccessible layers of history to propose the under-visible as a limitless terrain. The work moves beyond traditional structures of the photographic to create an alternate imagistic space which encourages decay and transformation. The physical points to the necessity of the ethereal by planting seeds of possible ways of seeing.
This work illuminates socio-political interweavings of embodiment and somatics in abstract images. In a clouds slow blinking eye draws in the earth, red clay from the artist’s childhood home in Maryland cracks and fissures slowly un-forming to reform under drips of water from a translucent waterskin sculpture suspended above the clay. The work detaches the possibility of images from photography and returns image-making to the elemental. With weeks of watering, the reconstituted clay sprouted seedlings embedded by wind, animal, or by chance; pointing to the possibility of becoming and renewal after reaching a seemingly exhausted state.
In night too is also a sun—a neon of a lunar eclipse—both light and dark hold the capacity for concealment as they do illumination. The possibility of imagining past limits is furthered in the use of diffused light. Influenced by what occurs during a lunar eclipse, where light from the sun refracts off atmospheric dust in the earth’s shadow to create a color cast on the moon. The blood moon activates the viewer as seleomanic somnambulist, passing through the earth’s shadow in the fissures of the un/concious. This moon obsessed state draws us to lose any conditioned relation to our bodies.
seeing is a rotten fruit creates a fever dream where illumination is buried within illumination. It pretends at clarity and leaves one at a threshold of perceiving.
