My art! My? Art?
To be clear: pictures of art I made. To be insufferably dense: pixels arranged by circuits arranged by hands in the order presented to a lens directed at an angle including marks made by pigments on surfaces influenced by a collection of cells called hands of a body of a mind directing hands distinguished only by place in time and innumerable unmeasured states of life and death to now strike plastic squares emblazoned with latin symbols to direct yet more circuits to dim and brighten pixels in such a way that these symbols form in another mind and bring with them patterns of fired synapses in uneasy atemporal synchrony with the patterns directing the hands. Shapes, colors, sensations; symbols, arrangements, representations; a finitely infinite cloud of recursively selfsimilar instances, outcomes, existences; an image in a mind of an image on a screen of an image in a wire of an image in a glass circle of an image on a surface loosely translated from an image in a mind after being struck by an uncountable number of photons bouncing around some wet orbs. I could be talking about looking at a reference image here or just the experience of seeing things. I could be trying to convey my frustration with the inherent loss of fidelity between my thoughts and yours. You could have stopped reading by now.
I could be writing an artist's statement, or trying to avoid writing an artist's statement, or trying to convey a deep dissatisfaction with ideas of self, other, art, statements. Or sharing a fascination with the connections between things and the distinction between things and their connections. Or highlighting the complications that arise from trying to speak ever more specifically, see ever more clearly, know and be known; the complications that only grow more and less like and unlike themselves. I realize that I cannot possibly make a point so well that everyone will understand and agree with me, and I hate this fact with every fiber of my being, or maybe I love it, or maybe I'm obsessed with it. I have to simultaneously lean into it and try to prove it wrong. This has all gotten out of hand.
Part of the problem is that I am very inconsistent. I have avoided putting the art I make up online for a lot of reasons, but a not-insignificant one is that trying to give any kind of context inevitably results in something resembling the wall of text above, which is deliberately vague and unhelpful (or is it?) (I just can't help it.) (Is the artist's statement not worth of its own sub-placard?) and at best a pretentious way of dodging the implicit questions, "What am I looking at?" and "Why?" which follow me around like mosquitoes. Another not-insignificant reason is a fear that the slight embarrassment of the inconsistent "quality" and "style" of work I post will influence what I make (and when and how and why and so on), which it of course will, but to be more specific: for a while I tried to post art on a hip short video platform, and very quickly found that it slurped all the fun and joy and exploration out of the process and the result, and I can do that perfectly well on my own. Also there's no money in it, and also it rots your brain SO hard. Can you tell?
I can't believe you're still reading this. Or, more accurately, I think it's a extremely funny that there's even a possibility that I will decide to make this visible to anyone and that they will read all the way up to here, and that I apparently think this possibility is large enough that I'm continuing to type. I guess I should try to say the things I have been avoiding saying up until now. I make art because I enjoy it. It's both an attempt to reproduce an image or idea and an attempt to work through an idea. I am obsessed with colors and shapes. I am obsessed with words and concepts and what they do. I am obsessed with the boundaries between things, the relations between things, the similarities between things, the components of things, the causes and effects of things, the patterns and cycles and structures of these things and their betweens. This time I really am trying to put it more clearly, but it's the difficulty itself that makes it fascinating. I think about things this way while I make art, and I think that's the best way to convey the context my art is made in. I work with every medium (media?) I can get my hands on, and I don't feel like listing them.