Made With a Pen: The Only Way to Live
Marker on paper, 2010
This work embodies my aesthetic roots and engagement with carnival as a communal and personal rupture of our regular, performed identities. It is a visual philosophy that relies on accumulation, misinformation, masquerade, and the wearing of the threshold between the sacred and the mundane.
“ ‘The carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, prohibitions’ (Bahktin 1968; 10). It is ambivalent in nature, related to the underworld, to change, to revolution, and renewal. “ (Joanna Isaak, quoting Mikhail Bahktin, and discussing the carnivalesque as a feminist strategy in Feminism and Contemporary Art)
Text disintegrates into letter-scrawls and becomes line, shape, fringe, net, pogo stick, leaping to claim its place in the dance of speaking-being.