2020 Motif,
A series of illustrated prose poems
by
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
I believe that the almost laughable succession of grim events can truly be laughable that if that’s what a person needs it to be. For me, especially in time like this, I like to think that realizing the painful and the unpleasant is just an indirect way of affirming pleasure or the desirable. It means the same in reverse of course, but the real respite for me is in the freedom to choose how it falls together. When I feel like I have the space mentally and creatively I can exercise that freedom, if I don’t the constriction seems to decide for me.
Since the start of the disruptive events of 2020, I’ve found that my mental and creative space has vacillated drastically in a series of slow and fast pulses. With each pulse there have been tensions, wars, and resolutions between my different emotions, thoughts, and experiences with my environment. I’ve found silver linings in these summer thunderstorms and I’ve deflated the sun on some of its brightest days.
This series I call “2020 Motif” is one of my attempts to materialize the clashes and outcomes in what I’d call my sense of internal space—simplified as openness and closedness—during 2020 thus far. Each piece is an attempt to create a representative mixture of dissonance and consonance synonymous with my sense of it. I’ve employed every aspect of their composition that I could toward this end: color, visual and verbal content, structure, visibility, borders, their interactions, and the order of the pieces themselves.
I hope that my attempt to (re)create these different senses of space can provide (for those willing to take part) a unique experience of an internal space that is personal, but nevertheless—for better or worse—shared with the rest of us, like the events of this year.
