11/24/13
The work is about uncovering and recovering. It’s a struggle we deal with everyday. The switch between friends and public transit; work and family; home and car. We constantly have to go in and out between realities, personalities, projections, behaviors, truths, lies. Sometimes you can find those secret moments of revealing of the flaws in a persons stark exterior. I find those moments in the pigment, in the wood grain, in the pools of ink and the frantic gestures of line. There are moments to be kept and accentuated, and those to be hidden and locked away beneath layers; sometimes so deep you will never know what they once were. The psyche is described as an iceberg, as in Freud’s diagram. The conscious and subconscious close together, but the unconscious a deep chunk beneath. I feel as though that gap between conscious fake sanity and screaming emotional trauma is much thinner than we would like to think. A few drinks or a few too many shitty happenings throughout the day, can easily breach entirely that top layer, leaving you in an emotional state far beyond the limit of acceptance. And we are always testing those boundaries.
My work is rooted deeply in those changes. I can visually and physically manipulate the moments of color, line, shape, texture.
It started with anger, as most moments of creation, for me, start with an intense emotion, a feeling of passion either positive or negative. But unfortunately, I’m starting to notice it’s normally negative. The angry drawings began as violent, pencil-breaking scribbles, and later evolved into more considered interpretations and involvements in those original scribbles.
There seems to be so much red – every piece has red somewhere – this deep blood color – fresh out of the body, adorning the surfaces. Red is a violent color, evocative of both anger and passion – both of which can be terrifying. But passion is most often seen as positive – yet it most often arises from a strong emotion. And negative emotions are vastly stronger than positive ones.
I have a desire for dissonance; a craving even, for discordance. The clashing excites me, takes me deeper into that unsettling place where emotions wait on bated breath for the moment when they can burst with terrifying energy. It’s amazing that after such exertion, we can have an explosion of adrenaline in the form of emotional outrage or an absolute crash.
Kal L. Cloonan 