Subject&Object Surrealism

 

We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality.” —Anil Seth

This series of paintings are dreams of the confusion between a person and the world around them. The the rigid material wall between us and the rest of the world, the shell of the classical figure, is broken, to see what emerges from an imagination-computer interface. A non-dualistic space of the artist and their tools, and the mind and world around it. What rushes out of that cracked egg of the body is a series of hallucinations that unfold in-between the subject and object. 

The paintings appropriate the western figurative tradition to explore a contemporary zeitgeist of dissolving boundaries: between subject and object, mind and body. In the paintings, bodies are shaped and dissolved into their environments through sensual interactions: they touch, see, breath into this ambiguity. The body is depicted not as the atomistic individual that we conceive in secular liberalism but as a field of particles, sculpted by and sculpting those around it.

The works often depict a way out. A return to nature. Nature as an escape from the horrors of modernity. Photographic surfaces melt into artificial digital mark-making. Like representation there is an obvious falseness to the images. This is not reality but a world in itself, like each of our subjectivities, hallucinating their own versions of the world with their own emotions and imaginations.

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Hyper-Objects