Passing Through
Video by Morgan Jones, tealteal.com
Artist Statement
Man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it. He is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still has the gill marks to prove it.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The awareness that we're living on the cusp of death, between the tangible and the transcendental is the dilemma of being human. My figures are caught in the final transformation of death, from inhabiting the space of a temporary terrestrial body to the afterlife possibility of existing in an unknown space. I investigate the possibility of a non-ordinary existence supported by the idea that we navigate both physical and perceived layers of reality. Our realities are composed of a perpetual navigation through physical layers of space and the residual memory. Each experience with these layers and frames of information forms a mental model or an internal cage that is the composition of self. Layered and weathered markings on the figures suggest the collected residue of physical experience and the etheric cages as the transformed and continued journey of self.