Art is fake. It is people and objects pretending to have a significance that they don’t actually have. Paint means nothing and a painting means nothing. This is the place where I start as an artist, the endpoint, the place where nothing has significance anymore. Of course, this means everything has significance. But such is post-modernism.
If nothing is significant, we must make something that actually contains meaning to make the truest and most honest art. That, I think, is my goal in art-making. I want to honestly show someone something that is true. And for now, all I know to be true is that of my own experiences and my own self.
When I was young I loved having friends spend the night. We’d stay up late playing video games and finally decide that we were too tired to continue and retire to sleeping bags. But at this point, a curious thing happened. We stayed up. And we began to talk. And at these points, I was the most vulnerable and the most honest. And so were my friends. We were sharing things together – things about our oddslot lives and our psyche and our experiences. It was affecting. It was beautiful. But, of course, I know this to be not a unique experience, it’s a near universal scenario. We’ve all been in situations where honesty takes over and the pure humanity of existence comes into focus. I want to create art in that moment. The moment where the young boy tells his friend his nightmares, something he would never share in the light. The moment where everything is broken and only ourselves remain.
Theatre is lying. Acting is lying. It is pretending and being as convincing as possible but still not true. There is no honesty in art. The work I make is also lying, but I’m trying to push it to something further. To a place of honesty and realness and non-artifice. I want to make work in those moments.
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