SHADES OF REALITY
Delving into colour, other dimensions and Bad Life Shit ™
Recently I’ve been able to feel the energy surrounding us and flowing through the world. It crackles beneath my fingertips and causes resistance between my palms. I imagine it flowing from all that is living, then being transferred and reassigned through death. Opening myself up to the movement and ministrations of my surroundings has been essential to my healing, this art, and has touched me in ways I can’t fully describe.
Idraw what I know, what I seek to find out from this world, and the way in which manifestations of reality are not as fixed as they might seem. I draw what other people don’t want to imagine. Rediscovering art, for me, came as a means of trying to feel while dealing with a host of debilitating mental illnesses and Bad Life Shit ™ . Through my art, I feel like I am free to explore my gender, race, and the fallacies of fine-tip markers in a way that feels manageable, meaningful, and accessible to me. My work is a way to explore ideas of changing energy, and to deal with trauma. It is a way to both depict and express genderfluidity, explore dimensional boundaries, and place pieces of a real and fantastical world together.
Alittle while ago, I experienced these real and fantastical worlds coming together and overlapping, complicating what is real and what is fantasy. I was vaguely indisposed in the park, staring at the houses of Esplanade, and in my peripheral vision I could see the tattoo of a tiger I have on my arm. Suddenly I felt the air grow hotter and my whereabouts in the world change. It was like I had come to a new place, and in this single static moment, I was a future form of myself. My tattoo was faded from life’s friction and years of being in the sun, and I felt a fullness, a calmness, a sense of tranquility that I hadn’t felt in years; like I knew it would be okay—like I am finally on a path after years of aimless wandering. My friend had recently done a tarot card reading for me that spoke to my need for decisiveness in order to feel fulfilled, and I had just made a big life decision. Meeting myself in time assured me that I had made the right choice; whatever path I was on, it was the right one. I can’t be sure, but as Fox Mulder once said, “I want to believe.”