I’m hosting my first art exhibition alongside my studio-mate Logan. We called it Weathering.
It’s in less two weeks and doesn’t feel real. I don’t feel prepared in the slightest, and I can’t imagine how this will all come together.
I say that now, just as a reminder that if you think I have things all figured out, if you think I am organized, prepared, capable, by what I am posting online or by the art you see, just know, I am surely none of those things.
My art feels chaotic. My mind is a mess. I don’t sleep. I barely focus on the necessities of this vessel to keep myself awake enough to continue on.
I am, I say with sincerity, at a limit.
And yet, in some ways I am content.
It is as though I am deeply unsettled by stability. When these times of chaos appear, a part of me exhales and rejoices, knowing she can make her awaited return. Being in a city for 4 years, the mask I have been wearing has finally begun showing its cracks. This mask is subtle, invisible, but holding a part of myself down, as if I have been trying to hide in order to play the game of life.
These cracks emerge the more I allow myself to step into my creative world. We think that painting, creating beautiful pieces, is just that. Beauty.
Yet, the more I paint, the more I open myself up to what it means to process my life, my ideas. I open myself up, constantly exposing myself to the experience of being human. I am forever tending an open wound. It is visceral, unnerving, completely raw. Most of the time, it feels like anything but beautiful.
And I am just barely scratching that surface. I am barely entering the dark rooms to meet my shadows, and even then I feel a push to hide this bloodied experience. To stuff her down, close the door, and distill all I am into something, digestible. Something tamed.
So that part hides for a bit, festering in the corner, until one day the door opens long enough for it to slither out, poisoning my well and turning this stability into rotten fruit again.
I will open that door, collect this rotten fruit, and present it to the city in an attempt to finally be known as an artist.
To take these chances, in your career, your relationships, your creativity, is to put yourself into embarrassment, and stand there despite the shake, for all to witness.
I think that’s why poetry sucks right now. Mine included.
As a society, we have become so afraid of ourselves. We try to sit polished and poised, pushing only our “best” selves forward, and shudder any emotional outburst. We live through screens so much that we try to flatten our own selves.
There is no room for nuance anymore. Over-explanation of our own emotion and existence is the new norm. We are an over-analyzing society.
To step into your own body is to rebel against the demands the world is placing on you to turn yourself into a product. We are living inside a system that has begun consuming itself. Capitalism as its own ouroboros, endlessly devouring its tail, mistaking its appetite for substance. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you are being asked to do the same. To consume yourself. To sand down the edges, package the remains, and call it a brand.
That is the curse and gift of art. It is a dance of ripping yourself apart to finally show you are human and the urge to rebuild yourself into something this modern world might just accept. Will you devour yourself as the sun or live on as something plastic?
And that is what Weathering is really.
Our connection with our humanness in the face of change. Despite it all.
We are fooled into thinking it is easier to hide, to become static, still, solid. We mistake our idea of stability as the marker for a true life. I should be more worried about the show. I should be trying to organize it into all of the visions I have for it, and become so locked in that I am completely certain that the night will go exactly as I wish.
But to do that would be against what the show is about.
A long time ago my friend wrote me a letter and at the end of it she wrote
“never forget, the mess is the message.”
I have been thinking about that line ever since. I think she knew something I was only beginning to understand — that the unraveling was never the problem. It was always the point.
Weathering is the process by which a thing becomes more itself. Worn by wind, by water, by time. It is change that does not ask permission. It is evidence that something has actually lived.
Why do we think we can make it out of this life unscathed?
Your mess is message because you have lived.
In less than two weeks, I am putting the rotten fruit on display, and calling it art.
