I admit that I am an experience hog; I like to have them and I hesitate to share them. We all have personal experiences, but as a whole they are all shared. We internally process them differently but the catalysts are all there even if we are not. I enjoy spaces that were once full of life and have become voids in time because of loss of functuality and the victims of sprawl. These spaces are us; they are a fragment of the processes that have lead us to here, and here is all we really have. I find myself drawn to places most people consider to be forgettable. There is an extra aura to places full of the ghost of the technological past, these undesirable spaces are further pushed into a state of suspension by the absence of people and the slow hints of decay. The season was spring, the year was forgettable, but the experiene wasn't. It was much like others but that day nature decided to affirm its presence. It was a bare landscape once full of industry, now full of nothingness and garbage. The frail poles and disjuncted structures proved to be extra hard to navigate that day, both physically and mentally. I could not help but to feel a sense of smallness when confronted with a massive and expansive landscape full of “who knows what?” structures, void of human life but full of signs of it.
After navigating about and being a “boy” for a while, the warm spring breeze suddenly turned into a forcefully cold wind, and a wall of gray came over me. Out of nowhere the motionless landscape turned into a blender of movement and life. A gaggle of turkeys that I had no idea were even there started to frantically scour for cover and stagnant pieces of the industrial terrain became reanimated. I froze like a deer caught in headlights. All thoughts left my head and a dash fueled with desperation followed. The heavy but sparse raindrops quickly turned hard and began to fall with such fury I had to take off an article of my clothing and wrap my face. Running full steam ahead , my face was taking the brunt of the jabbing upper cutting hail. The frantic escape I needed to make was problematic because of the blinding wall of frozen liquid that seemed to be in front of me no matter which way I turned. After reverse navigating my way out of this forgotten place, I quickly made my way to the safety of a motorized vehicle. A feeling of even more smallness came over me. My thoughts returned and I realized that I basically had no control over the situation, other than my own curiosity that had lead me there. What had happened would have happened with or without me. I went to a place thinking I was mastering it by invading it, but in the end it showed its supreme mastery over me. Every physical space extends way beyond me, with an infinite history and future that I am only a mere part of and I will never truly be able to know it beyond my personal experience of it. While these spaces don't necessarily depend on us, they have become as they are partially because of us. All I can do is try to capture my experience of it in art because that is what personally justifies my part of the experience. Through painting, I am able to share an experience at some level.
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