acmesthesia

In the fall of this academic year I proposed the following for my painting thesis, 

“For my senior painting thesis, titled “Catharsis ex Cathexis,” I plan to challenge the conception of an incontrovertible and hegemonic truth. Through unexpected surreal collisions of multiple realities, I plan to fabricate and liberate new conditions of existence for both my painted subjects and those that experience them. With saturation and dramatic surreal composition, this work will directly address viewers forcing them to confront hybridities between gender and reality, offering vague, delicate alternatives with sharp edges. Using photographic references, which I stage and manipulate, I wish to articulate otherness and social disbelonging that manifests inner turmoil through visceral ruptures of fleshy reality and psychological trauma through physical corruption.

My work will be over the top and as a whole rebuke minimalism as I find such conventions of forced restraint offensive and in line with the values established by hypocrites like Bruce Bower, that touted the necessity of respectability politics for the social acceptance of the queer subject. The manipulated photographs will not necessarily follow the principles of physics, each of which are far extrapolated theories that ground themselves in arbitrary assumptions at their core.

The imagery will gravitate thematically around pleasure and pain, decadence and aesthetics, and the obfuscation between our human identity as both cultures and creatures. The onus of this project is to disconnect viewers' experience from the world around them by providing an all-encompassing moment of awe from their situation in front of the work. The pieces will entwine the multifaceted nature of reality that is often elided in naturalistic and subdued portrayals of the world around us. I will buy into universal societal, religious, cultural, and sexual conventions and transmogrify them, subverting their original contexts and meanings to fabricate theatrical, obsessively ornate compositions that offer reminiscent, proliferated phenomenological symbologies in contexts that defiantly satirize the arbitrary nature of the supposed truth.

Artifice is quintessential to my painting thesis. I’ve found from the past years of art-historical scholarship alongside over a decade in formal photographic education that a large portion of modern artwork claims to purport the hegemonic and incontrovertible truth. I plan to dismantle this myopic stranglehold through camped surreal aesthetics, wherein the ascetically minimal are provoked by paintings that offer unabashed analysis and expression with no such promises. In a world that finds anymore than the plain as superficial, the pleasure derived from my work is an act of revolution.

That which declares its own authenticity but is indeed false, is to me, exploitative. That which embraces artifice, wearing it as a badge of honor, rings true.”

— Harrison Haft, Fall 2022

This preliminary title referred to Freud’s ideology of [the cathectic and] cathexis: the obsessive craving for material or metaphysical satisfaction that is desired with such fervor that the sensations of that thing are catalyzed. hunger for an apple so intense that you swear for a moment that you felt its crispness caress the roof of your mouth, that you heard its crunch and its crackle, its cleave by your teeth echoing in discordance the moans of your roiling stomach. Or, the embrace of one for who long you have been without. When your eyes shut and your mind salivates for oxytocin, there’s a warmth there is there not, one that blankets a gradient over the barbed wire that might prick is into remembering what is and what is not, who we believe ourselves to be and what chemical engines or ineffable ephemera constitute a shared thing between you and I that roils beneath our skin of paint. 

‘Catharsis ex cathexis’ arose as an offering for viewers of the planned paintings to scratch at cultural and primal liberation sensorially armed with the “vague, delicate alternatives with sharp edges” that itch through the palincest images and surfaces of my work. At the same time, for myself, the project represented an unfettered embrace of my obsessive compulsive neuroses and my synesthesia by which my senses orgiastically recombine. They dress the phonetic with flesh and form, while performing unsolicited entropic one-offers at the whim of stimuli. 

From this triad the persisting onus emerges: to enrapture viewers with an object-image enigma, born from the inextricable union of the referential and the material, that when first encountered offers witnesses a precognitive glimpse of experiences not only beyond but also behind the understandings that nest within their subconscious.

From the fall of 2022 until now in the late spring of 2023, my project underwent several metamorphoses, none of which denatured its nascent intentions of envisaging otherness through the sublime, the final title of the show reveals as much. Rather than beginning anew, the scope of the project was sharpened through processes both within and outside of my control. 

Acmesthesia: an “awareness of sharp points through touch without pain,” is based on Ancient Greek akmḗ, “point, highest point,” and aísthēsis, “sensation, perception.” Akmḗ comes from a family of words related to sharpness, whether literally or figuratively, both within and beyond Ancient Greek.

The first few months following the submission of the aforementioned proposal were spent carrying out weeks of material studies and experiments while drafting superfluous final concepts of works, some of which you would tell me were impossible if you heard me wax endlessly about—to which I retort: they are improbable. This unlikelihood of existence, a hybridity resulting from patience, process, and the daydreams of a neurotic pansy, revealed itself to be central to my thesis during the production of the pieces for the collection in the spring: dusting sugar and hydrochloric acid on ionized copper; encrusting 99 handmade transparencies with millions of microscopic glass beads manufactured to coat traffic-paint enlightening it with reflective luminosity; hand-cutting 192 vertical slits, ⅝” deep into 2 ¾” sheets of 4 x 8 plywood; laser-cutting 704 inlays that just barely rise above these slits on another lenticularly sliced pair of 4 x 8s. 

The results of these endeavors yielded, in my mind, paintings that obfuscated their image status through abject objecthood, existing equally and synesthetically as visual and physical phenomena; viewers' concentration on half of this dipole inevitably results in their cathectic desire to understand it through the other. I’m proud to have created such paradoxical works that resist stark definition, instead, extolling their plurality.

As I worked on the project in the early spring, the slick, artificial aesthetic–a stylistic calling card of my work, began to cohere, alongside an oppositional force of aesthetic (as in the realm of sensational experience), of roughness, of striation, of indexical force exerted upon the material surface that denied such status as merely representational. Sharpness not only of sight but also of touch. 

Knowing that the layers of complexity and directness of my work–that suture over one another–would be received polemically, Acmesthesia, “awareness of sharp points through touch without pain,” became a fitting summation of my artistic and intellectual goals for the project. I know people who gorged themselves on the sharpness of the works I made, and perhaps more that reviled it fearing it’s abrasivity and presentationalism rather than acquiescing and allowing themselves to dissipate within its minced minutia.  

Just before Winter Break in December of 2022 I had a wonderfully deranged epiphany concerning a piece that I’d been referring to as Rage of the Hunted Dove for the collection. The image, which I spent months 3D animating, texturing and rendering, was of a field of nude male figures, some with wings, some with translucent skin, wrapping around each other in flight. For this piece I’d been 3D modeling prototypes of a surface to paint it on. The idea before December had been a half-egg-like semi-ovoid that would allow the viewers the sensation of being consumed by the perspective of the work as they stood in front of it with curved edges expanding towards them in each direction. 

With the newly inspired form that follows, it became Proxima Mundi, “the next world.” In looking at fresco painted domes like that of the Sistine Chapel and navigating through Rome on Google maps I had the idea to change the perspective of the image for this piece into a fully spherical projection. I immediately began engineering research and construction of a prototype made of out wood, then moved on to polyurethane spray foam and then expanding pour foam. I spent more than ⅔ of my Winter break on campus working night and day on a hand sprayed and sculpted ⅛ of the 10 foot diameter sphere for this painting, made of GreatStuf expanding foam, foam tape, and a wooden buttressing system. It was nearly completed when classes were beginning, having cast about 80% of it in a 5 ft x 5 ft x 5 ft mold that completed the curvature of this spherical segment to create a perfect square. Unfortunately, I got a life-threatening infection and had not been moving quite fast enough to complete the mold in time for classes to resume in the space I was using. I deconstructed the entire thing with a hammer and a saw as I’d built it to resist impact not to be portable. After convincing my upstairs-neighbors to allow me to use our shared garage as a studio space for this part of my thesis, I began attempting to rethink the production process. 

I’d been on the phone with a manufacturer in Guangzhou and after a month of negotiating got enough carbon fiber to cast the mold I’d been making 8 times at 15% of the original price. Foolishly, I was never able to stand back and find the form to be close enough to perfectly round. I moved on to dozens of layers of bondo and then plaster to seal the form I’d made but these layers quickly added hundreds of pounds and dozens of days of work onto the project that ate away at pretty much every waking moment of my time.

So, with only two or so weeks left I got a 10 foot diameter beach ball from a circus supplier and attempted to cast it with the carbon fiber I’d cut into hundreds of squares and began to interlace on the surface after coating the entire surface of the ball in 3 layers of mold release and then saturating the carbon fiber with epoxy resin. This entire process–the first time–took up about 50 hours in one weekend doing discrete parts so that they could partially cure before the next phase. As it was an inflatable mold I’d moved onto I had to stay next to the ball during each and every moment of these 50 hours. The last day I began at 10 AM and worked until 4 AM constantly reinflating and checking for peeling points of the carbon fiber. At last, as it had cured enough to support its own weight, at 4 AM I decided to sleep. I awoke at 4:30 to a banging sound and ran to the kitchen window. The sphere was broken. 

I repeated this entire process a second time. This time, when it happened, I saw someone scurrying away. It might have been the people who were throwing rocks at me while I was in booty shorts and a gas mask earlier in the day, or maybe it was just a squirrel, one that’s strong enough to dent a material used for aerospace and military applications. No, that would be nuts. 

Regardless, the greatest feat for my thesis I’d been laboring tirelessly on for months had been cut short. The poetic irony of something sharp destroying the obra maestra, or rather orba maestra, of a collection naming itself as the “awareness of sharp points through touch without pain,” is not lost on me.

The carbon fiber would have allowed the 10 foot sphere to attach in 8 discrete parts weighing a total of less than 17 pounds with a surface area of ~256 square feet. I designed a module that earlier on was going to attach into the base to allow the entire sphere to magnetically levitate. As it spun in place one side would rotate out of natural light and into artificial gallery lighting and vice versa. The image would’ve had night depicted on one side and day on the other so it would’ve evoked a passage of time as the viewer remained still. Furthermore, due to the nature of the spherical image, when encountered at exactly the right distance but from any angle, the surface of the painting would have appeared to invert. It would change from the illusion of looking at a concave spherical surface to a convex fish-eye perspective into a 3D environment that the viewer had the sensation of scrolling through as if it were a virtual reality environment or a google maps dome. When, at some point in the near future I complete this iteration it’ll be titled The Weight of Revolution.

It was horrifying adjustment to consider this work as not existing within the show but there was I, Sisyphus, crushed under the weight of my ambition; as I will continue and complete this project post graduation I prefer to think of this crushing weight as an exposure-therapeutic exercise in allowing openness to adjustment and the unexpected within my work. I pruned this branch of my thesis, allowing time to flow into all else that I’d set before myself. 

Should I have been less freakishly ambitious and anally retentive? Absolutely not. That’s not what I learned. Rather, dayenu was the takeaway. Meaning, “it would have been enough,” a Hebrew call and response prayer phrase, this sensation of dayenu came from my realization that every single piece in my show would have been enough to have been a complete thesis. In accepting the loss of Proxima Mundi–what will be the size of two inverted chapel domes, in what would’ve been less than 2 weeks of time to paint had it not been sabotaged by forces unknown–the essence of Acmesthesia was distilled. It gained clarity and cohesion allowing for the works I did create to benefit from what would’ve been an Icarian recovery effort. 

What if I’d solely embarked upon creating the sphere as my thesis? 

Dayenu.