There
were many times in my teen years that I felt trapped and overwhelmed by
an intense sensation of loneliness which was often magnified by the
opposing pressures of conforming to normalcy and natural desires. For
the most part I was able to keep these feelings at bay during the waking
hours with my obsessive over achieving, but during the night when all
of my distractions faded away and all that was left was me and my mind, I
endured an overwhelming deluge of emotions from claustrophobia to
depression, anxiety, and loneliness. The periods of pain were such that
all I could do was clutch my sheets and curl into a ball, riding the
torrents until they inevitably subsided.
In
conceptualizing this piece, I wanted to bring all of the factors leading
into these events into the image and use the resulting contortion of my
body to disturb the surface that my form is projected upon. When I
felt myself returning to these memories, I clutched the fabric and
curled my body much like I did when I was younger and was able to
capture not only a physical representation in the imagery, but a tactile
distortion of the surface that mirrors the dissidence within my mind.
The folds created during the performance fracture and distort the
proportions of my limbs and demonstrate my warped psychology.
When
I viewed the completed piece with my professors we again experimented
with rotating the composition to determine if there were any significant
emotional/compositional changes and I was delighted to discover that
the perceived emotion shifted based on the orientation. The top left
(also my favorite) feels as if the figure is falling and has been swept
away by a torrent, the top right as if the figure is trapped within a
box, the bottom right begins to introduce a sense of violence, as if the
figure has been pushed or knocked over, completely losing its balance,
and the final conveys the greatest sense of violence with the figure
appearing to have landed roughly on its head.
