"To feel everything in every way. To feel everything excessively"
-Fernando Pessoa
This sensory odyssey explores the depths of the human psyche, embarking on a journey through cycles of life, death, and rebirth.
By combining traditional drawings and animation with generative programming, my work navigates the delicate balance between existence and non-existence. It portrays the conjoined processes of creation and destruction through abstracted symbols and dimensional forms. I invite viewers to immerse themselves within the installation space, considering how their reality intertwines with works from my imagination. Each frame is a portal, revealing a labyrinth of emotions and sensations. Images flicker and dance over each other and across the walls, mirroring the sensations of our existence.
My practice affirms the power of introspection and self-discovery. By confronting the uncomfortable truths that lie within us, we can awaken to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. I find solace in the fullness of the unknown and hope viewers may appreciate this moment of stillness amidst the chaos of our lives.
Installation Exhibited at Grunwerald Gallery, Video courtesy of Grunwerald Gallery
Installation
Methods
Programs used: TouchDesigner, Adobe PremierePro, Maya, Unity, Adobe Audition, Adobe Photoshop.
Mediums used in video : 3D modeling & animation, 2D drawing & animation, computer generated visuals & animation, A/V, graphite on paper
Context & Influences
This project was influenced by my love for literature and philosophy. Writer Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1888. Pessoa is well known for his use of heteronyms or literary personas. Although his peers used literary personas as well, Pessoa’s are distinct as he gave his heteronyms entirely separate lives from his own, personas that even interacted with one another, each consistent with their own life, individual psyche, and identity. Pessoa’s writing would adapt to these personas, the three most well-known heteronyms being: Alberto Caeiro a rural uneducated poet, Alvaro de Campos an English naval engineer, and Ricardo Reis, a physician who composed formal odes (“Fernando Pessoa.”). It is through Pessoa’s writing and concept of heteronyms I find inspiration in my own examination of human connection, the psyche, and identity. Pessoa’s heteronyms demonstrate his view of identity as something to be created and flexible, which follows his rejection of traditional ideas of individuality and authorship. Through Pessoa’s heteronyms I see an examination of the psyche, and self-introspection. Pesso believed we all were made up of these personas, as he stated,
“Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt”
Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa’s most infamous work The Book of Disquiet often described as a “fact less autobiography” is a compilation of Pessoa’s personal reflections about life and demonstrates his fascination with the themes of loneliness, introspection, and alienation (Pessoa). Throughout his work Pessoa repeatedly denies his existence as an individual, “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,”. He explains his denial of self by stating, “I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it is because I have nothing to say.” This highlights Pessoa’s revelation of his indifference to life and his belief that he has not lived a life worth being seen as lived (Kirsch). Through Pessoa’s imaginative world of personas, that interacted with one another and his dissociative perception and rejection of living, I find influence in my work as I seek introspection like his and in my interpretation
Pessoa’s previous statements appear to describe my personal experience with the concept of the void. However, departing from Pessoa’s seclusive practices, I find the act of reflection through vulnerability, acceptance of all emotions and connecting with others to be the goal of my project. This goal being as Pessoa once wrote, "To feel everything in every way. To feel everything excessively” (Pessoa). My insistence on exploring emotions in my work not only comes from the overwhelmingness of my own feelings but also my lack of emotion. This is where I find the importance of the duality between wholeness and nothingness or everything and nothing. Duality to me is important as we tend to organize perceived reality in terms of opposites such as, light-dark, life-death, and day-night (Gleiser). The opposite of everything being, nothing. Nothingness being synonymous to empty space, also known as the void.
The opposite of everything being, nothing. Nothingness being synonymous to empty space, also known as the void.
Greek philosopher Parmenides argued the non-existence of nothingness. Parmenides believed that “eon” also known as the essence of “Being” existed everywhere thus the concept of the void was impossible. This was further agreed upon by other Greek philosophers such as Aristotle who believed the void was impossible as he believed in the existence of aether, an infinite substance that fills up all space in the cosmos (Gleiser). And even in present day physicists such as Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physicist and astronomer at Dartmouth College, argue that empty space does not exist in physical reality. Gleiser explains that fields permeate all of space, that even electric charges create their fields.
An example is how our bodies create a gravitational field that “‘spreads’ throughout space and falls within a distance.” Particles are seen as field excitations like how waves are produced when a rock is tossed in a pond. As Gleiser states, “physical reality is now seen as consisting of fundamental fields and their excitations” . Furthermore, in the argument of the nonexistent void, space is filled up with dark energy, a mysterious entity that accelerates the expansion of space. This can be thought of as something like Aristotle's aether as discussed earlier. Now I will explore the psychological and spiritual concept of the void.
installation
American scholar David Loy offers a distinction between the fear of death and the dread of the void through examining the lack of self in psychotherapy and Buddhism. Loy argues that within Buddhism the worst problem is not death but rather the,“terrifying suspicion that each of us has that ‘I’ am not real right now” (Loy). Which he describes as the “dread of the void” through the denial of self. According to Sigmond Freud, “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” (Boag). Repression can be described as denying some part of the self, which Freud discusses one can choose to ignore and concrete on other things, yet these repressed thoughts often return to consciousness. Repression can erupt in obsessive ways which affect consciousness with what is being ignored. This returns to duality by repressing an aspect of self yet it impacts the conscious with what is repressed. In Buddhism repression can be seen as “anatman”, the denial of self.
Self-consciousness is seen as a mental construct in psychotherapy and not “self-existing” (also known to the Buddhists as wabhava). Loy explains that if the sense of self is a construct the issue that occurs with this is when the self-consciousness wants to make itself “real” which results in the ego-self entering a never-ending cycle of attempting to objectify itself into the world. Furthermore, Loy explains this when the self creates a shadow, a sense of lack which it “always tries to escape” (Loy). This lack manifests as guilt or anxiety. As American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker explains, "the irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation: but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive” (Loy). In my interpretation this void can be described much more as a feeling of finding a lack or confusion and repression of the sense of self as it cannot be fully objectified in the physical, which in turn manifests into negative emotions.
Inertia, graphite on paper, 2024, 18x12 in.
Maintained by the Sidney and Eskenazi Museum of Art as part of the IU campus collection, and currently displayed at 111 S Eagleson, Indiana University.