Artist Statement/Walking Tour
Hello and welcome to the walking tour.
This tour will occur not in physical space, but in an imagined psychic space. You can choose to imagine yourself anywhere: a deserted island, an empty mall, your childhood home, a dark forest, or an endless expanse where your only point of reference is a perfect horizon. Any of these places are fine. Imagine for yourself a place of your choosing. The focus of the tour will be several large portals that have just appeared within this space. Each of these portals emits lights and moving images. Each one represents a different aspect of your life: your dreams appear in one; your daily obligations appear in another; your aspirations appear in another. The portals contain fragments of scenes, as if you seeing parts of your life as movie footage. Intermingled with these scenes are colored shapes that you intuitively understand as the symbolic forms of various sensations, concepts, and beliefs. For example, the sound of a friend calling your name has a certain shape and color. The sensation of feeling nostalgic after smelling something from your past has a certain form and hue. In this tour, we will be looking into these portals, one by one, standing at each threshold.
First, we walk to the portal to your goals and aspirations. Look at your long-term goals: are they really what you want? How do you think you will feel if you finally accomplish them? What then? What if you accomplished all of your goals-- would you want to come up with new goals? That might be stressful and Sisyphean. Would you then rather not have new aspirations? That might not be meaningful either. Perhaps there is another way of experiencing time and meaning that frees us from this double bind. A shape symbol appears that you understand as an answer to this dilemma. What are the contours of this shape? What are its colors?
We take a step away from that portal and move to the next: the portal of your obligations. In the portal are obligations to other people: friends, family, coworkers, bosses, government officials. Some of these obligations provide immense meaning and a sense of kinship. In contrast, some of these obligations feel soul-crushing and unfair -- the result of politically contingent forces falsely presenting themselves as the natural order. All of these obligations make demands of your time, of your mental, physical, and emotional labor. They compel you to DO something or FEEL something. When was the last time you did absolutely nothing and didn’t feel guilty about it? When was the last time you felt something without any doubt? A dizzying array of shape symbols appears at once in the portal. You immediately understand them as potential experiences.
In close proximity to your obligations is a portal to your fears and anxieties. In this portal, you may find that some fears are more reasonable than others. Some seem overwhelmingly massive, yet at the same incredibly fragile. You may see old anxieties that no longer control you along with ones that still do. A shape briefly appears in the portal . When it does - your current fears seem transparent and powerless.
Finally we arrive at your dreams -- what do your dreams look like? Do you feel more free in your dreams or in waking life? Have you ever had a dream that feels intensely meaningful, but doesn't seem logically coherent upon waking? Or have you ever had a dream so awful and horrific that you felt tremendous relief upon waking? Have you ever had an experience that felt both intensely meaningful but also felt like you were waking up to something?
You see a blurry shape symbol appear that looks like this kind of experience. Try to make out its edges. What are its colors? The shape moves closer to you, and its contours become more defined. As it reaches the threshold of the portal, you suddenly know that it will go beyond the threshold, become a reality, dissolving all of your burdens in an instant. You know that you will wake up feeling quiet and fantastic, as if you were harboring a glorious secret.
Thank you for coming to the tour.