If you have made it this far into the AUTODESIRE website; then I am already in love with you.
Welcome to the Deep cuts; Research notes.
Prior to AUTODESIRE’s Creation:
Prior to the AUTODESIRE project, my studio practice produced thickly colored figurative drawings with a kind of cyber punk surrealist style. 42 of these early drawings were exhibited in ANTI, the 6th Athens Biennale is Greece in 2018. These drawings were reviewed in Artforum and Artnet news.
This was the first press attention my art practice received and I was just beginning to study for my Master’s degree in Art and Theory at Northwestern University. Instead of re-producing the style I had gained recognition for; I decided to to chase a deeper theory and opened up my art practice to change. I decided to obliterate style and chase a visual language embedded with theory itself.
Understanding AUTODESIRE:
The AUTODESIRE project is massive and ongoing. I think this project is more about the experience than to understand it. Currently the number of drawings in the series is 280. I will be slowing the production of this project to center other projects in my art practice; but this project will continue. I do not understand entirely why I make these types of drawings; as much as I attempt the explanation and research behind the work; I am just am much explaining these reasons to you; the reader; as I am to myself. I think it will take me many more years of making this before I may really know.
The Birth of AUTODESIRE:
In early 2020 at the start of the pandemic I was in the last quarter of my graduate studies at Northwestern University. I was preparing my graduate thesis without any campus or studio as the entire campus was in lockdown due to the virus. During this time I was taking a PH.D level course on the works of Philosophers and critics of psychoanalysis: Delueze and Guattari taught by the amazing Professor and Esteemed Academic; Paula Zamperini. In this class I was assigned to write an essay on the book “One Thousand Plateaus”; however with the stress of the pandemic I found I could not write anything despite having felt I did understand the concepts of this book.
It occurred to me that perhaps my understanding of this material could describe a pathway to abstraction; and maybe I can articulate this understanding with shape and form in a visual sense; with drawing and painting. One key background research note that contributed to this initial approach is the thought forms of Annie Besant; a Theosophist from the late 19th early 20th century; who posited that thoughts have a visual form equivalent; that a cacophony of shapes inside of a Kandinsky could actually be the articulations of an essay…………And that what I was looking at between these ideas was actually a map to abstraction. And so I wrote to Professor Zamperini to ask if I could submit the essay as a small series of drawings instead of words; and she agreed. She said it was a good thing; as a person who studies the visual to have a visual response to this theory.
The first 22 drawings of AUTODESIRE; CHAPTER 1: The Naiad and The Scorpio was submitted as an essay to Professor Zamperini in April of 2020. The drawings were unique for my practice; a form of abstraction that felt really organic. I used a paper for these drawings that was lashed into novel book size diptychs with climber’s tape; which allowed me to close each drawing while I was working on the series. This first batch of paper was toned with cadmium yellow and muddy pyrole reds. I went on top of the color with oil wax pastels and slowly built up forms with layers and layers of marks. To see this first chapter in comparison to the whole project: Chapter one feels quite primordial; and every successive chapter has gained or lost something from the last.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms the whole of the AUTODESIRE can be described as a “body without organs” and the project attempts through its images to liberate subjectivity, using borderless roiling forms to expand beyond the boundaries of subjectivity. The inculcated chaos in AUTODESIRE is a function of the controlled and sustained “line of flight”.
And if AUTODESIRE is “body without organs” then it can be grown too as a “rhizome”. Where the ideas behind the actual construction of the work was also taken from this text. Each chapter was “grown” where the bones where laid out and about 20-30 drawings were worked on simultaneously before moving on the next chapter. The whole of the project was designed with this Rhizomatic possibility to be as big or as tentacular as it need be.
As soon as the AUTODESIRE project began to start a second chapter; I knew this work was beginning to depart from the theoretical origins of “One Thousand Plateaus”. The structure of the project was created with this theory. The structure of the abstraction was created from this theory. And inside the structure of this project; it allows me to also become completely omnivorous and to let the project absorb the moments happening around it. The structure is the small size; the fold; the book; the under-color; the development that is slow and in layers. all of this structure came from Deleuze and Guattari’s dismantling of psychoanalysis. Where the structure of the AUTODESIRE book is the canvas for this ongoing madness; raw un conscience processes
Notes on the content of AUTODESIRE’s images:
Once the form/process/structure of the AUTODESIRE project had been established; this works as a processing engine that I can feed any form of inspiration or compilation into. This is where the AUTODESIRE work received the name AUTODESIRE. The theories that created the structure of this project allowed for a playground for which I can explore my own human story and memories while mixing with myth, stories from literature, film, ideas from other theorists, things and friends around me. The assembling of image in this work can be compared to a “Beautiful Katamari” which accumulates pieces of all the stories and idea the writer encounters.
This accumulation is not without direction. Each image in this series has an individual new pseudo-narrative unique to itself; but that image is the result of accumulation of past stories. I want to draw pictures like Kathy Acker writes words; Im drawing also with erotic lines.
Where other projects of mine have much more specificity; AUTODESIRE is the dream journal. It is more the place where subconcious is released and I can have the most freedom. I want to indulge a figurative drawing that at any time can be so loose it could fall apart. Expression here is read in the immediacy of the mark making; there is force and speed in pastel marks here; place where the surface dents with the pressure of the pigment wax
AUTODESIRE has drawings where are more figural; some are more abstract; some almost dissolve completely. The anxiety of the pandemic was so disruptive to my personal life as well; that these small drawings with really deep color saturations was my safe place to register the chaos of the moment
A New Eroticism:
Prior to 2018; the content of my work had very little to no erotica; zero entanglement with desire or flesh. I wanted to make drawings and paintings that have an erotic charge to them because I felt this spark to desire; to create a glowing ember inside a person who is viewing the works. Eroticism is important because it has the power to heal, the power to imbue living spirit into a person who may be feeling depression or someone who experienced trauma. I feel Eroticism in painting in many forms and images; and it is not confined to pornographic; I believe eroticism is the antidote to the pornographic because with eroticism we have left room for our imagination; our passions. In eroticism we are active agents in the construction of our desires.
In the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic; I was at the end of months of mild isolation because I was in the last year of my graduate studies. I was looking forward to freedom after the completion of my degree. Instead of freedom; I faced lockdown; a further psychotic drive to this idea that “safety” means we should separate ourselves from our communities. I have no stomach for political discussions on what happened in this time. But the effects of it were universal. A collective trauma.
I was experiencing enormous anxiety; everyday isolation alone in a single room apartment. I was cut off from my studio; from my means of production. Coming to eroticism in the AUTODESIRE drawings was my way of indulging my desires; to tend these desire like a garden made entirely of imagination; and that imagination is made from millions of tiny pieces of the world put together in a million different ways.
Eroticism became the language of the AUTODESIRE project. With these small works; I could become an explorer or this language; explore the entanglement between eroticism and intimacy. Here in this work I am wanting to articulate something about our erotic relationship to self; and the erotic relationship to “the other”. I am interested in how we define ourself through the erotic. I am interested in the feeling of intimacy where a body is both whole and takes on the characteristics of a multiplicity.
For me painting and drawing is the language of desire because here I can say all the things I cannot say with words. But also I am interested in playing with the semiotics of image.
Eroticism is not always about satisfaction; More so it is the cycle of desire and seduction and denial; satisfaction maybe does not exist in AUTODESIRE.
I think a thing other than a human body may have the power of eroticism. A car can be a extremely erotic object; A mountain can be an erotic mountain.
The car is many things in the AUTODESIRE works; but mainly it is an erotic surrogate. It is the site of eroticism; the site of intimacy; it can be an object of desire; it can be a body of desire. A car both has a body; and it carries bodies. I am endlessly fascinating with the car as an erotic actor.
Color as eroticism. The pastel is a ready-made pallet. It is augmented through under color of pigment washes. This augmentation turns a limited pallet of 50 pastel color to infinity color through layering; a kind optical blending.
The AUTODESIRE book as an object is stark white but when it is opened it is so extremely densely color. Like a a pair of tropical insect wings; this is intentional. Where the image can be closed, can exist as a small denial until it is opened again.
AUTODESIRE; IMAGE and vision.
This research note is about myself because it really informs the way I am approaching color mixing and form in this work.
I have had a neurological condition from birth called visual snow. I see color very intensely; I am very light sensitive. I joke all the time Im a Vampire because sunlight feels like needles in my eyes. I cannot see large blocks of solid color or white or sky without very heavy interferance and I prefer to look at things with more contrast because of this condition.
You can see a simulation of my vision at this website link which is set to settings at which I experience the phenomena:
