Mortality guides all of us. It simply takes some flaking of the skin and it is there in all of its unabashed glory. In each and every single one of us, a clock ticks and in that clock lives all that we have been made to be, who we were born as and who we will die as. The boundaries between our lives and our deaths can be natural or controlled, and are never set.
Being alive is nothing more than a state, it is not a privilege and nor is it a gift. We simply exist as it has been ordained by those who never knew us, and from there we become a drain for many of life’s pitfalls, exaltations, and stagnant moments. It all culminates in this thing we call “death,” a supposed end for all that we’ve reached for. Growing up, I’ve had to deal with viewing death as inevitable, and watching the people in the hospitals around my father’s rooms wither and wait. I slowly began to become obsessed with the shadow in the chair opposite the hospital bed. In this, I found my love for death and its complicated ways it reaches into the human mind, and how it can take the life out of anything at any given time, even just before birth. I will carry this obsession to my grave. This gave me my nihilistic delusion.
As a child, I was raised Catholic. Everything was done in the name of God; that being said, murder, rape, genocide, discrimination, hatred, was all in the books. It was holy to die as a martyr, someone who was killed for being self-righteous, and as long as you screamed your Hail Mary’s and crucified yourself in repentance, you could have been saved, no matter what you’ve done. I’ve never repented, I never even fully believed. I spat the words that were fed to me without an ounce of feeling. Yet I still had a delusional fear of God and punishment, and a spiraling terror of hell itself, consuming me for never praying and never caring. I’ve never done anything that could be considered a capital sin, yet I went to bed every night mortified of what I might endure in the bowels of Hell. This gave me my religious delusion.
After much healing and a lot of growth, I have begun to combine these fears together, I have finally been able to create work that really reflects everything I’ve been running from, and in turn, looking for. In my work I am able to fully represent the degradation of my own mind and how I see everything coming to an end.
Being alive is nothing more than a state, it is not a privilege and nor is it a gift. We simply exist as it has been ordained by those who never knew us, and from there we become a drain for many of life’s pitfalls, exaltations, and stagnant moments. It all culminates in this thing we call “death,” a supposed end for all that we’ve reached for. Growing up, I’ve had to deal with viewing death as inevitable, and watching the people in the hospitals around my father’s rooms wither and wait. I slowly began to become obsessed with the shadow in the chair opposite the hospital bed. In this, I found my love for death and its complicated ways it reaches into the human mind, and how it can take the life out of anything at any given time, even just before birth. I will carry this obsession to my grave. This gave me my nihilistic delusion.
As a child, I was raised Catholic. Everything was done in the name of God; that being said, murder, rape, genocide, discrimination, hatred, was all in the books. It was holy to die as a martyr, someone who was killed for being self-righteous, and as long as you screamed your Hail Mary’s and crucified yourself in repentance, you could have been saved, no matter what you’ve done. I’ve never repented, I never even fully believed. I spat the words that were fed to me without an ounce of feeling. Yet I still had a delusional fear of God and punishment, and a spiraling terror of hell itself, consuming me for never praying and never caring. I’ve never done anything that could be considered a capital sin, yet I went to bed every night mortified of what I might endure in the bowels of Hell. This gave me my religious delusion.
After much healing and a lot of growth, I have begun to combine these fears together, I have finally been able to create work that really reflects everything I’ve been running from, and in turn, looking for. In my work I am able to fully represent the degradation of my own mind and how I see everything coming to an end.