DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS/
ANCESTOR WORSHIP

2016

SANDPAINTING AS SCULPTURE

To paraphrase artist Hedwig Houben, in the end, work is a representation of all the processes which emerge during the creative process: the questions, doubts, and ideas.

Where there is decay and the end of times, so too comes the new and beginning. Bricks and bones from our neighbors and grandparents’ fall away, macerated and reincarnated as glass and steel temples of high techies. Where does dust, or kipple - in reverence to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - go in our vision of the future? And, who cleans it up? Where do they come from and where do they live? Dust, in Dick’s vision, symbolizes “entropic ruin”^1 which de Senna also views as apathy - culled from our culture of distraction, where minds and bodies seek a Benjamin-esque^2 harmony with technology.

“In order to move further down the narrow path of the present, modernity shed all that seemed too heavy, too loaded with meaning, mimesis, traditional criteria of mastery... Modern reductionism is a strategy for surviving the difficult journey through the present.”^3 Could Boris Groys’ “modern reductionism” be this dust, this kipple of our progenitors and their sheddings (of depression, war, or immigration) into a modern life?

The sanding, puttying, and painting within the creative process, brings forth an aesthetic, formed and stuccoed to a violent, mythic landscape.

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