Is there a beauty to abstracting reality, or is it dangerous?

What is in the space between thinking and being? Perhaps, that’s where becoming happens—where the abstract becomes particular. This body of work plays with abstraction as an examination of human consciousness. 

I started with smears and dabs; I let them bleed; I watched; then, I detailed them into a particularity. Understanding bleeding is important. When you follow how you bleed, you know what pains you. And radical honesty with the bleeding in your being could help you see clearly. 

This body of work contends with the edges of human identity and how it develops. To do this, I had to contend with my own identity and its edges.

It was hard. 

In one painting, a woman cries as a fire-breathing iguana rises from her back. Iguanas are invasive on my mother’s island. I had to contend with the invasions of my mind, and how they burned. But there’s a certain beauty to burning. It purifies. Like silver in a fire. This is a love letter to burning.

In the other painting, a woman cries as a castle weighs heavy on her back. She reaches into a puddle that ripples away from her.

The process of making these was an exercise on the limits of language. What cannot be verbalized yet, and what does it take to turn an abstraction into a particular experience? How is this relevant in an age of abstraction, AI, and efficiency? 

There’s dangers to logicizing abstraction if you particularize it too early, because that can cause a misrepresentation of reality. 

We are living in an age of reduced friction between thinking and being. Computers are thinking for us—there’s a danger of identity in this. What happens to our becoming when we allow a computation to particularize for us? How is human dignity affected when we give away our creativity to a machine?