Original artwork description:

Some of us experience a sort of pendulum swing between the belief that we have control (generally, in relationships, etc) and the opposing feeling that we are at the mercy of some mysterious hand holding our framed lives together by a string. The framed painting inside of the room shows a horse pulling a carriage through the sky. This is Helios in Medea, an example of Deus Ex Machina. An outside force enters the story to resolve the mess. The child in each of us wants that hand to come into frame and clean up after us. The outside force provides order. But the frame is spinning on a string, implying the hand holding up the frame doesn’t even have complete control. The trumpeter in frame could signify the adult in us, and he plays the trumpet toward the window, through which there is a lightning strike. This could imply the lightning was summoned by the trumpeter, therefore revealing his control within the frame. OR, the lightning is random and unrelated to his trumpeting. Or maybe he’s trumpeting because of the storm. In our search for meaning, we (perhaps) engage in apophenia, which is the habit of imposing synchronicity and meaning in the face of mere coincidence. The painting asks if the lightning is coincidence. It also asks if the whole apophenia question is contained within our little frame of reference, outside of which is a greater frame of reference that we could never comprehend and that has its own unique questions.

Materials used:

Acrylic

Tags: