Oil on Linen
76.4 x 203.2 cm
Oil on Linen
76.4 x 203.2 cm
Oil on Linen
76.4 x 203.2 cm
Oil on Linen
76.4 x 203.2 cm
Oil on Linen
127.1 x 61.5 cm
Oil on Linen
127.1 x 61.5 cm
Oil on Linen
127.1 x 61.5 cm
Oil on Linen
127.1 x 61.5 cm
Oil on Linen
91.2 x 91.2 cm
Oil on Linen
170.1 x 240.2 cm
Oil on Linen
107.1 x 107.1 cm
Oil on Linen
105.1 x 105.1 cm
Oil on Linen
145.1 x 165.2 cm
Oil on Linen
157.4 x 206.0 cm
Oil on Linen
90.1 x 60.2 cm
Oil on Linen
105.2 x 164.9 cm
Oil on Linen
105.2 x 164.9 cm
Oil on Linen
124.3 x 124.3 cm
Oil on Linen
168.2 x 109.9 cm
“I think he’s just lonely”
E: My friend, she gave me someone to work with, you know, like an easy one.
R: What do you mean?
E: Like, he’s low maintenance, I just text him once a day. It doesn’t even matter what I say...
R: Does he ever want more?
E: No, I think he’s just lonely. It was just one to learn on, you know my friend had so many and she just gave him to me to look after... he doesn’t want to lose it so he doesn’t do anything weird
R: Does he pay?
E: He pays my rent now
R: One text a day? Nothing in person?
E: Yeah, he loves me
Excerpt from Interview, 2023. Research interview for [WIP] modern love.
Exploring perception and prejudices around the relevancy and value of love in the modern world
So what do we agree on? So far we agree it's potent, real or otherwise, wherever you stand you will be asked to define your relationship to it. How you experience it, what it means to you and what you use it for. You didn't have a choice with how you learned it, that was your upbringing. You inherit whatever your environment and genetics have learned so far. If you're reading this, maybe you've realised you can change that. Maybe you don’t want to.
There are schools of thought for all the different vectors that can be drawn between the human condition and our deepest battle against isolation. We’ve been telling one another how to do it since sentient meat realised it’s power. We come built with an innate desire to find companionship, something about the perspective of another helps us justify the pain of existence. Maybe we share it so we can continue dreaming together without being reminded that one day it will all stop. Using one another as a moving totem to keep us wrapped in the beauty of the present.
So why the need for agreement? Some need it more than others, those who's futures and pasts pull them from the here and now become vulnerable to it's power, those that can master it's power can subdue those that idolise it as reality. And for others, they use their power to simulate the experience, crafting environments that look like love if you squint hard enough.
Our children and creations will try and figure out this life with our tools, should love be one of them? If so, what do we write on the instruction manual. Or is the mystery behind it part of the experience?
I know what I like, but maybe it’s better if we just let everyone else decide.
Attendees enter a converted changing room one at a time.
Attendees use supplied markers to write a Secret or Lie on the Wall.
Attendees exit the room.
“I cheat on my wife with men”
We protect our deepest self from those closest to us, but why?
Do we all live in fear that our closest held secrets may be incongruent with the avatar we’ve concieved and sold to the world,?
Do we fear that when the world discovers our secrets we’ll be jettisoned from our narrative into a world we’ve tried to run away from?
What would I do if I knew what you were hiding?
How would I feel if I found out it was the same as me?
What if deep down, the pain that I bury, is actually what makes us the same?
Confessionals (2022), The changing rooms of a retail store are converted into a confession booth. Participants enter one at a time and write secrets and lies on the walls.
The silent exchanges are imprinted on my mind, to see a soul that’s just opened is one of life’s rarest gifts and I will forever be grateful for those that showed me their’s. It’s a clean, deep connection, a neat closure of an experience from one soul to another. But, when it’s a group, that’s when it gets messy.
The anxiety and relationships of power quickly invade the experience, it’s fun to sit in that wonderful anxious energy of the group, or if you want to get particularly dirty a couple. They never realise that the game begins before they’ve entered the room. When you learn the sounds and scents of deceit it can be a little intoxicating, and the smell starts as soon as one of them realises what is happening. With deceit in couples it’s always winner takes all, and there is always someone in the team that has a deeper secret to hide.
You can feel it on them, they approach the game like a trap, pawing around it to see how it works, more often than not they’re carnivorous, pupils dilated they know there is a prize in the trap, but there’s a cost to retrieve it… It’s the experienced ones that are the prize players, refined in their approach, calculated. Their positioning and ability to move their partner across the room the first secret we share together. Sometimes they admit what they’re doing, the eyes never lie. It feels exactly like what it is, infidelity. The irony is that as one partner is sent into the room with a ‘Why don’t you take a look’ to ‘Check and see what it’s like’, the other is telling me that the experience is for them, ready to release the baggage but not for it to affect them.
I watch without judgement, only admiration. The walls confirm the assumptions: infidelity, desire betrayal. There’s no explanation or justification besides power, and it’s ability to corrupt. Even within our small worlds and our intimate relationships, we hide and fake our way through it. For some of us, we’ve made a world where we thought we were free, the powers we held let us go out into the world and do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do. And for some of us, those little adventures came with wounds and scars that weigh heavy over time.
And when we come back from our secret worlds with our scars and secrets in tow, how do we reconcile the difference? What if we liked it on the other side? How do we know which us is us? aren’t they all…