THE VOID, REFLECTED

Caravaggio, Marilyn Monroe, and Grok.  Always online, always on show.

Our contemporary existence is replete with the illusion of free will, of agency, of choice. 

Our modernity is awash with shiny buttons, likes, and clicks, endless scrolls of amusement that we can hardly pull ourselves free from, bleary-eyed in idle captivation — we are guided, curated, and corralled by the novelty of the new, enmeshed with a synthetic online reality curated just for me myself and I — Smoke and mirrors contrived of branching pathways that feign free will, eliminating choice by giving us what we want, the deeper into the rabbit hole we fall.

'The Void, Reflected' is an artwork that holds a literal mirror to this world of idle captivation and amusement — the work is a multifaceted form inspired by the famed Marilyn Monroe image* where multiple perspectives of the movie star are reflected; each a perspective of sadness, joy, and the trodden sanctity of anonymity. 

Everything all at once always and forever now.

Nothing is private.

This work so to reflects multiple possibilities and multiple realities — an infinite parallel range of potential — albeit through a convex lens of reality distortion that contorts ourselves in a lovely ugly way.

115 pieces of 1.8m long blades line in 3 walls — each blade clad with highly polished mirror convex surface of stainless steel — reflecting light, the surroundings, and the self. On the reverse side and immediate background, an inky void of black velvet absorbs light. The dichotomy is intentional.  On one hand, everything is reflected; on the other, everything is absorbed into the void.  Again, an allegory to the reality distortion of the modern condition — what you see is not what you get.

The blades of reflectivity and absorption rotate in distinct patterns — each related to its adjacent blade and the one next to it and that next to that and on it goes...  The blades rotate in accordance with the waveform formula that governs the speed, position, and angle of rotation — waveforms of that run in phase of frequency and amplitudes in harmony, yet periodically the waves shift out of phase whereby a deleterious entropy becomes more pronounced and order disrupts to chaos as the blades run out of phase and out of synchronicity in explicit disharmony. Until the waveforms align in phase once more, harmonic frequency is regained, and synchronicity prevails — until the next cycle of devolution.