The brain makes its own collage. It fires in illogical blasts, like a fireworks display in the hands of a madman. I still remember the handful of plump black raisins that suddenly appeared, as though in a thought bubble above my head, when my dad threw the word “spanking” at me back in 1977. “Raisins,” I said, my limbs cold and dumb with fear. Resisting the impulse to race to my room and put on every pair of underwear in the dresser drawer, I turned away and lay my forehead against the window, tossing a mental salad of spankings, raisins, underwear and terror for some time.
Nothing has ever made the kind of sense it’s supposed to. I listened through the heating grate as my mom dictated a rape victim’s testimony in her stenographer’s deadpan. From the victim’s mouth to the stenographer’s ears. From those ears through the fingers and onto the stenographer’s stacked paper tapes, registered as blotchy purple code only the specialist can understand. Back home in the basement, the purple code bounces against the back of the stenographer’s eyes and comes out through her mouth, sucked clean of emotion as though that was part of the job.
What the body registers is impossible for the brain to synthesize to its own satisfaction. The line that connects one thing to the next and one body to the other is elusive, barely traceable, impossible. People who study people suppose that it is because we are physically so incapable of defending ourselves that our brains are enlisted to work overtime to separate us from the dangerous and connect us to the safe. When a brain is born terrified, it works to the point of exhaustion, and begins to eat itself.
I work to understand the sometimes hilarious, sometimes wretched struggle between the human compulsion towards order and control, and a hunger for chaos and accident. At times I work out of compulsions I don’t understand, towards an end I can’t predict, with materials dictated by a place in my brain I can’t get to. Other times I start with a source– usually a text, or a series of images– which I work to untangle, using my body to drag it through my brain’s filter, or my brain, to run it by my body.
I am compelled by the idea that we may be connected by one essential, infinitely repeatable element. The replication and regeneration that characterizes the growth of living systems seems to embody an almost divine balance between chaos, order, accident and control. I am trying to understand that language visually. I am looking for connections, ways to make all the brain’s firings and the world’s fragments add up to something that matters.
Nothing has ever made the kind of sense it’s supposed to. I listened through the heating grate as my mom dictated a rape victim’s testimony in her stenographer’s deadpan. From the victim’s mouth to the stenographer’s ears. From those ears through the fingers and onto the stenographer’s stacked paper tapes, registered as blotchy purple code only the specialist can understand. Back home in the basement, the purple code bounces against the back of the stenographer’s eyes and comes out through her mouth, sucked clean of emotion as though that was part of the job.
What the body registers is impossible for the brain to synthesize to its own satisfaction. The line that connects one thing to the next and one body to the other is elusive, barely traceable, impossible. People who study people suppose that it is because we are physically so incapable of defending ourselves that our brains are enlisted to work overtime to separate us from the dangerous and connect us to the safe. When a brain is born terrified, it works to the point of exhaustion, and begins to eat itself.
I work to understand the sometimes hilarious, sometimes wretched struggle between the human compulsion towards order and control, and a hunger for chaos and accident. At times I work out of compulsions I don’t understand, towards an end I can’t predict, with materials dictated by a place in my brain I can’t get to. Other times I start with a source– usually a text, or a series of images– which I work to untangle, using my body to drag it through my brain’s filter, or my brain, to run it by my body.
I am compelled by the idea that we may be connected by one essential, infinitely repeatable element. The replication and regeneration that characterizes the growth of living systems seems to embody an almost divine balance between chaos, order, accident and control. I am trying to understand that language visually. I am looking for connections, ways to make all the brain’s firings and the world’s fragments add up to something that matters.
