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Description
This piece was originally a digital sketch for a large, permanent installation. It involved lots of mediums and mechanical stuff—pulsating lights, a hanging plaster face, a giant frame that was to be suspended behind the face, and a breaking-out-of-the-wall feeling with surrounding cinderblocks on a wall built out, then cracked to reveal the surrealist reality inside.
I bit off too big of a project for me to complete on this one, partially because the skills it involved were not skills readily available to me. building the plaster face alone (which is the one piece of the installation that got build) was my first crack at plaster, and the unpainted face is about three feet tall and weighs a ton. While the project stretched me deeply, i eventually moved onto other things because of a following meltdown that comes when an ambitious artist realizes they can't quite fulfill their vision as first seen.

So, while the "Artist as a Prophet" Installation, or hanging, living sculpture may not exist, this digital photomanip. piece does. The file is probably a couple of months old, but i finally decided to tweak it, polish it, and put it up for prints and veiwing. I really hope you enjoy it.

I'm going to take a moment to explain the symbolism here because it's important. Some people may not like it, which is fine, and you can totally interpret it however you wish if a meaning strikes you personally, but this was during a time when every piece of everything symbolised something in my art, so i'll explain my interpretation.
The face in the center, hovering inside the frame is the Artist, opened to a portal beyond typical human comprehension (the Muse) that allows the Artist to inseminate news worlds that grow life into an otherwise bleak, desert landscape. This landscape is the dull, dreary, daily life of monotonous tasks and hollow ideology, of constant longing and unfulfilled desire, eventually covered over and squelched into death. We walk over these desert sands unaware of our own peril and those around us, until we meet the Prophet.
The Prophet, like the Artist, has a gift into seeing not what is, but what can be. The Prophet, like the Artist, may be subject to ridicule, hallucinations, and emotional turmoil, but ultimately what the Prophet sees is life-changing and revolutionary, potentially on a global scale. The Prophet sees what the Artist opens up through the connection to the Muse, and realizes that we must walk into a new light of understanding, of life, and of personal meaning. Hence, the Prophet is like a stilt-walker, using a common-day stick that everyone has in an uncommon way: standing upon them like a two-legged platform, looking to what the Artist hinted at, and ushering other to enter into what the Artist knew intuitively.

I suppose this could more appropriately title the work "Artist and a Prophet", but for me, the two are actually the same thing. Through art, the one who sees the Muse propheseis about religion, about philosophy, and about society, much in the way Monet down the pipeline down to Picasso and Pollack heralded a post-medieval society where truth was no longer hard fact, but was subject to perception. Eventually, society became so chaotic or confusing that one could only paint in large swaths of color like Rothko or in dripping lines like Pollack. There genius was in showing that there still was something to be gained from the post-"modern" culture, and that truth could still be garnered from art, but now in a different way. Rothko insisted that his paintings were dramas of human emotion, even though there's not a single expressive face in his canvases. Pollock said he painted the atomic age, even though there are no bombs to be pointed at there (somebody correct me on these roundabout quotes if I'm wrong).

So, basically, the gist of my piece is to explain that relationship. Some people may poo-poo art because it's pointless, because they don't know what it is, or because it's not utilitarian. This is so far from the truth, and this piece (though perhaps, if we should tell them why, it should be in a well thought-out, academic essay, but screw that) tells us why. Enter into this dance. It was made for you. And the Prophet points to the horizon for good reason: Morning is coming.

Description
This piece was originally a digital sketch for a large, permanent installation. It involved lots of mediums and mechanical stuff—pulsating lights, a hanging plaster face, a giant frame that was to be suspended behind the face, and a breaking-out-of-the-wall feeling with surrounding cinderblocks on a wall built out, then cracked to reveal the surrealist reality inside.
I bit off too big of a project for me to complete on this one, partially because the skills it involved were not skills readily available to me. building the plaster face alone (which is the one piece of the installation that got build) was my first crack at plaster, and the unpainted face is about three feet tall and weighs a ton. While the project stretched me deeply, i eventually moved onto other things because of a following meltdown that comes when an ambitious artist realizes they can't quite fulfill their vision as first seen.

So, while the "Artist as a Prophet" Installation, or hanging, living sculpture may not exist, this digital photomanip. piece does. The file is probably a couple of months old, but i finally decided to tweak it, polish it, and put it up for prints and veiwing. I really hope you enjoy it.

I'm going to take a moment to explain the symbolism here because it's important. Some people may not like it, which is fine, and you can totally interpret it however you wish if a meaning strikes you personally, but this was during a time when every piece of everything symbolised something in my art, so i'll explain my interpretation.
The face in the center, hovering inside the frame is the Artist, opened to a portal beyond typical human comprehension (the Muse) that allows the Artist to inseminate news worlds that grow life into an otherwise bleak, desert landscape. This landscape is the dull, dreary, daily life of monotonous tasks and hollow ideology, of constant longing and unfulfilled desire, eventually covered over and squelched into death. We walk over these desert sands unaware of our own peril and those around us, until we meet the Prophet.
The Prophet, like the Artist, has a gift into seeing not what is, but what can be. The Prophet, like the Artist, may be subject to ridicule, hallucinations, and emotional turmoil, but ultimately what the Prophet sees is life-changing and revolutionary, potentially on a global scale. The Prophet sees what the Artist opens up through the connection to the Muse, and realizes that we must walk into a new light of understanding, of life, and of personal meaning. Hence, the Prophet is like a stilt-walker, using a common-day stick that everyone has in an uncommon way: standing upon them like a two-legged platform, looking to what the Artist hinted at, and ushering other to enter into what the Artist knew intuitively.

I suppose this could more appropriately title the work "Artist and a Prophet", but for me, the two are actually the same thing. Through art, the one who sees the Muse propheseis about religion, about philosophy, and about society, much in the way Monet down the pipeline down to Picasso and Pollack heralded a post-medieval society where truth was no longer hard fact, but was subject to perception. Eventually, society became so chaotic or confusing that one could only paint in large swaths of color like Rothko or in dripping lines like Pollack. There genius was in showing that there still was something to be gained from the post-"modern" culture, and that truth could still be garnered from art, but now in a different way. Rothko insisted that his paintings were dramas of human emotion, even though there's not a single expressive face in his canvases. Pollock said he painted the atomic age, even though there are no bombs to be pointed at there (somebody correct me on these roundabout quotes if I'm wrong).

So, basically, the gist of my piece is to explain that relationship. Some people may poo-poo art because it's pointless, because they don't know what it is, or because it's not utilitarian. This is so far from the truth, and this piece (though perhaps, if we should tell them why, it should be in a well thought-out, academic essay, but screw that) tells us why. Enter into this dance. It was made for you. And the Prophet points to the horizon for good reason: Morning is coming.