navigation

January 30th 1988, a baby girl was born and directly from her mothers womb, she was thrown into a world or art. Her bathroom at home had chalkboard walls her daddy had found in a dumpster. She would draw while in the bath. On the toilet. Brushing her teeth. She had a trampoline and a swing and a playhouse where she drew a collection of faces, people she‘s never met: IRENE, BECKIE, SAMANTHA, RACHEL. She made scuba masks out of plastic-ware boxes and twisty straws and she dreamed her house was the ocean. She would build forts and whole entire worlds if she felt so obliged. When she got older she drew in class, she drew in her textbooks, she even drew on tests about presidents and parts of speech. She signed her name so it made a cat’s face, or a simple zigzag. She saw the world differently, and as she got older, this made her extremely contemplative, she would over think everything. She saw in things, around things, underneath things. She saw skeletons walking down the street, or muscles moving. Her dad said she caught the disease, he feels bad. Its his genes. She wanted to grow up. Be on her own. Make art. Not very realistic, yet she never thought about WHY she wanted this, you see, she just always did. It wasn’t her choice. Its God, or faith, her religion? All of it, it’s what I am. Why? Because she couldn’t survive without it, or she couldn’t control it. She would draw herself because she’s always around. All the time, she thought about losing her arms or losing her vision. Its getting there, she thought, almost blind. Growing up she thought she could see through walls, or move objects. She would watch TV when suddenly the image would split into two and then the halves would drift away from each other. After years of seeing double she was diagnosed with Strabismus (heterotropia, tropia : abnormal alignment of one or both eyes) What would I do without these eyes? So she did her research: "Our eye is like a round ball. The outer layer is a tough white coat that is clear at the front. Light passes through the pupil and lens, and then strikes the retina at the back of the eye, sending a message to the brain" to the arm to the hand to the pen to the paper. After a year of vision therapy and prisms, she had surgery. She wore an eye patch. She thought she was going blind. My memories have morphed into film stills and photographs, marking events in my relatively banal existence. Art allowed me to get through my "angsty" teenage years, pouring myself into the peeling leather bindings of sketchbooks. I have documented wild explorations of abandoned buildings, leaving a trail of film cartridges and spilled ink, making it a lot easier for me to find my way home. Hansil and Gretel, 2005. I'm married to art, and will be until death do us part.