RETURN TO FORM pt1: Back and Forth

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

There is null in complexity and depth in deconstruction. No matter how much we achieve we must always return to form.

As a child I had always had a strangely obsessive fascination with fossils. Archeology and paleontology took up a huge chunk of my psyche up till my early teens. Late 2021 I started coming to terms with the passing of time; after spending more than a year ridden with the anxiety of a typical quarter-life crisis that was simultaneously crippled by a pandemic (that seemed almost like an accumulated result (and confirmation) of a generation's growing nihilism).

Isolation and impulsion did me no favors. I was at the lowest point of my life (as far as my narrow, tunneled view could tell, anyway), and I wanted to create something that was an exercise in deconstruction. Figure, bodies, skin; prehistoric stone.

I drafted first out of geometric shapes; simple, easy to follow. Large swaths of circles and lines created the borders for connective tissue and limbs. Somehow coincidentally the image became of two figures seemingly amidst conversation, preserved in stone. The details fell into place on their own. Endoskeletons, exoskeletons, translucent carapaces. Pushing and pulling, trying to understand myself, to see what makes us human. An orderly study of such chaotic being.

Back and Forth

Archival Ink on Paper

84 cm x 59.4 cm

2021