Space-making; place-making under amnesia. The Fantastic is the mediator of fragmentary (lived-) experience–to fill in or leave blank or reorganize or synthesize–
the act of remembering is a practice of the fantastic
Folkloric or alternate reality or virtual worlds or the imaginary/made-up bear a fairly extensive lineage of historial application, i.e., as an appeal to the fantastical in the face of tangible chaos (sociopolitically, internally,….) or boredom,, which is itself, a form of chaos. Boredom is largely an effect of the industrial/capitalist/neoliberal complex; namely, this complex fosters conditions of boredom and violent manifestations of chaos. Escapist fantasies seem almost a necessary means to mediate reality via psychological creativity. Palpable recourse! Dream! I’m thinking about e.g. abramtsevo circle(s’) return to folk forms; anime boom and co-option of Disney visual culture post-war in Japan etc. etc. Fantasy is a super-ability and fundamentally opposed to and a subversion of structures (that sanction ways of being, are hierarchized and imposed).
What other world is known to me? Or that may already reside within me? Or is unbeknownst to me? Are there disjunctures in my world? Does my reality permeate through?
Where does the fantastic perform?
The iconography available to me through which I construct imaginary realms, is that foundational imagery I grew up with. World-building in childhood through Nintendo…its use feels natural seeing as Nintendo deals in the same language of imagination that I try to engage now!
It enables me to access parts of myself in the framework of a nonlinear continuum, making sense of certain events/things not based in chronological narrative but on other terms (forcing certain confrontations) and without notions of maturity (that I think often cloud sincerity or dampen significance).
There are two things–not mutually exclusive: the idea of the fantastic as escape and as allegory; the latter providing a channel between fantasy and reality. Allegory exports moral concerns premised on a terms of morality/code of ethics derived from earthly conditions.
I locate the mediation of reality and fantastical in the body…not an assertion (in fact, problematizing distinct notions of either the fantastic vs. reality is probably quite important). The body exists in the space it has made for itself, it burrows in the [ir]rationale!–of course, given material reality (that is so often dictated by external forces). And if the body facilitates the confluence of fantasy and reality, then the limits of the body must not be defined by its flesh. The body exists in multiple dimensions, a messy everywhere, disorderly, expansive and immaterial. A phantasmagoria…with no regard to time or space as parameters for where it lives.
Futurity is vivified by the magic of the fantastic; the conception of a novel and learned world is radical fantasy.
2021
oil on canvas
5’x3′
2021
skeletonized fish and hair
2021
skeletonized fish and hair
2021
skeletonized fish and hair
2021
skeletonized fish and hair