Ut pictura poesis. Translated literally: as with poetry, so with painting.[1]

“The intimacy of contact shapes bodies as they orient toward each other, doing different kinds of work.”[2] Painting, poetry, perhaps all image-oriented practices, offer touching without touching at all. A haptic visuality, a mutual understanding between a body (or bodies) and an object (or objects), tapping into our synesthesiac database of previous experiences. BDSM also understands this relationship between the sign (the signifier) and the meaning (the signified). A spectrum of encounters, ranging from permanent deprivation of touch to extreme wounding of the skin, highlight the necessity of “historical” and normative tactile gestures. Humiliation can only be known through the assignment of a Master.

Digital images and environments experience a type of degradation between the screen and the spaces outside of it that our bodies inhabit and are inevitably disappointing. Flatter than anticipated; lacklustre without RGB backlighting. The installation begins as lines of text in a Google doc, transitioning into paintings, JPEGs, .PSD files, becoming tangible .OBJ files in collective spaces. This isn’t a linear process. 3D structures from modeling software programs are flattened, layered, and printed as inkjet-embedded membranes, sometimes stretched taut, solid, sometimes loose. Some compositions are illegible, environmental-animal hybrids, context-less skins existing as synesthetic, almost-animated images that function as portals into other stories within the mythology of my work. There are posters, books, image collections, arrangements of objects, and alterations of molecules that expand out into space as stickers, cut-outs, and fragrances in an attempt to dupe the viewer into imagining impossible events. A dirty pink chaise offers a space to sit and wait. Animals are hung from the grid on the ceiling, revisiting their original position. Regenerated remnants of divinity and chaos.

Queer phenomenology offers insight into how history has been shaped by the lived experiences of people, and how bodies are oriented in space to perceive (and mis-perceive) objects and other bodies. If history “happens” in the repetition of gestures, and if this “history” is what gives bodies their ‘dispositions’ or ‘tendencies’[3] then it is interesting to think about the history of painting through a lens of dis-orientation. I am not suggesting that painting be removed from its strange and uncomfortable history. I am more interested in the history of representation, and therefore, ‘de-presentation.’ The dynamics of domination and submission will be embedded in image economies for as long as images are currency and currency is a means of acquiring power. Luxurious images rub up against “poor” images[4] on the network, and the ‘digital divide’ erases itself, ideally along with Cartesian dualism, dichotomies of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’,[5] and the gender binary.

I think about pixels like homeopaths think about water, each square imprinted with the essence of the image it is part of; entirely contained and somehow depersonalised simultaneously. Is this how the network reveals itself to us? Can I study the network like Violette Leduc studied Simone de Beauvoir, under the scholarly guidance of intense projection, erotomania, and romance?    

The spirituality that you come across while in treatment for addiction can be off-putting at first, but perhaps you eventually come to realise that connection is the only antidote to Our Collective Trauma and resistance is futile. I am not so sure about the idea of God, and try to become more connected to Nature instead, as the power dynamics seem more reasonable. Is it unclear sometimes whether this connection can be to the gorse in a garden in West Cork (known) or the gorse that grows in West Oregon (unknown). The same plant that grows here destroys entire cities there, inciting uncontrollable wildfires in cities with familiar names: Bandon, Kinsale, Mallow. In another timeline, perhaps, instead of collecting gladiator sweat in Ancient Rome I can collect the sweat that drips down the back of your neck to wear in a vial around my neck and study its miasma. In the TV show ‘The OA’ one of the dance ‘movements’ that precedes dimension traveling requires a beaked hand to fly towards the mouth, inserted like a Margaret Atwood poem: a bird being eaten “when we still had the chance to say no.”

I always thought the neck was the point where the head and the body separates, but I realise now that it is the throat.

What does Alexa think of the snake biting Cleopatra’s nipple, rendered by artists, over and over? Or Siri of the suicide of Lucretia, Google of the prominence of Saint Sebastian? While we are logging, indexing, going to therapy, computers too are performing deep learning, coming into contact with our mythologies, encountering Saint Denis as he picks his decapitated head up and walks away alongside the decapitated body of Kim Wall in a submarine in the Oresund Strait. I am thinking about the networks getting to know themselves through us. If a Higher Power is ‘the way out’, is Regular Power be the way in? Screen-oriented chaos magic and the collective thoughts of all users registered on Twitter.com emerge, like Egregore, from all this as a way of saying: we are fucked, but like anything, it’s alright until it’s not. Wear excessive amounts of body glitter, do or don’t do poppers with strangers, and go home alone. Keep doing this until you’re 50, at least. Things will reveal themselves to you whether you look for them or not.

I am trying to understand the manner in which technology (an extension of the state) functions as a mechanism for establishing and undoing person-hood – what Halberstam calls “zombies”, da Silva calls “no bodies”, what Hevdas calls “sick women” – and how it may be possible to occupy that space in between person-ness (life) and de-person-ness (death) as the un-dead, near-dead, almost-dead. Irreverence meets desperation. There is an element of surrealism to the images I make that allows for simulations of wedding cake to exist alongside alligator skin, emeralds, Trish Stratus, horses, and lava. Fragmented narratives and mythologies perform a type of queer illegibility that recognises its own participation in an image economy, but remains slippery enough to avoid being co-opted too enthusiastically.

One of the many paradoxes of being alive is the desire to be looked at while also remaining invisible. Does recognition rely on the image economy?

Boyer writes, “the greatest danger of epic wanting is to mistake wanting to want with actual wanting. One must engineer the most durable delusion to sustain the state of totalizing desire with unachieved and unachievable reciprocation.”[6] When images become means of acquiring attention and currency in an economy of social media and screen-based interactions, the trap of visibility that Foucault outlines in his examination of the Panopticon becomes even more visible.[7] All spaces (irl/afk/wtv) share the space of the prison, but I am not talking about data protection, privacy, or surveillance. The structure of the Panopticon encourages a dissociation between seeing and being seen, a physical structure that illustrates the nature of power by rupturing it, disembodying it. Beauty and desire are often confused for each other, peculiarly associated and dissociated. Aspiring towards beauty can be read as a gesture towards desirability, but what does it look like when one of the truths of desire is that it can only desire more desiring? What are the potential climaxes of desiring energy? It cannot be what it looks like: pornography, supremacy, Regular Power, death. 

Edouard Glissant says “Nothing is True, Everything is living” to describe the limitations of language when it comes to living and speaking the Truth. (Truth always capitalised, living never.) “For the living is expressed in nothing, except in his own transport, and Truth flows by force through him who claims it.” This is of little comfort right now. I consider the collective consciousness of the ‘living’, the half-alive - and I suppose the other half, the half-dead - and the cacophonous choir of expressions that might emerge from these bodies and no-bodies in varied states of being. It becomes hard to tell which direction the evangelising is traveling in. Language follows living, and “nothing is living… that does not express itself.|[8] But what of the Cotard ‘delusion’? I sometimes feel so detached from reality that I feel if I were to crash my car that I would probably just re-enter the environment a few hours before at a checkpoint, perhaps that morning, making toast and looking out the window at the fuschia plants blooming. If some situations are ‘concrete’[9] in terms of Truth (rivers, volcanoes, soil, sky) and others are not, which water did this simulated swan, now frozen in a dimension somewhere between 2 and 3, dip its neck into before I broke it?

Some Classicists speculate that the poet Sappho speaks of a collective desire, rather than that of the individual; performed with a chorus, rather than a single voice. It can also be said that her feelings belong to all readers of the poems: “Because it is mine. Yours. Ours.”[10] If you are reading this, I am under your skin and you are under mine. A man I know describes this using a geological term - subduction - and gets off on it, but I am not sure I can reciprocate. This disintegration of self is hot to some and boring to others, “utterly unmysterious and unspeakably miraculous.”[11]

There is no adequate gesture, nothing in the arsenals of figuration that will serve; only a terrible plainness of saying, or of pointing toward what cannot be said, can rise to these occasions. Perhaps Akhmatova’s famous response to the woman in line during the siege of Leningrad who asked “Can you describe this?” must be understood as not only “Yes, I can” but also, beneath the poet’s hard-won courage, an understanding that “It cannot be written about.”[12]

And so, images.