Blog / 2023 / Shapely and Shapeless

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Singular reality. That’s how I used to describe them, the people in my life who act like their perspective is the only true one. I think now the closest term to describe these people would be that they gaslight others. Singular reality people tend to forcefully convey their version of the world, to a degree where many of us end up questioning our own perspective.

Throughout my life there have been people who have made me believe that I am who they say I am. They’d tell me that things I say are dumb, making me less likely to speak up again. Or they’d let me know, in no uncertain terms, that something about me embarrasses them. There’d usually be a part of me that didn’t agree with their version of reality, but it was always hard for me to hold onto my sense of self when the messages I was receiving were, by and large, negative.

I think it’s actually why I became an artist. I wanted to break off little pieces of myself and put them into the world so that people who didn’t know me personally could still see me, and they could, hopefully, reinforce my idea of myself as someone who had interesting things to say instead of only dumb things—or as someone who wasn’t embarrassing, just different. For the record, I don’t think that dealing with having an unstable self-image by asking for external validation is necessarily a healthy way to do things. I’m just saying it’s something I’ve done.

And it’s what this painting is about. Of all the images from Everything’s Fine, my series of surreal paintings about mental health, this is the most like a self-portrait. The octopus—that creature who’s at once shapely and shapeless—is me. My limbs reach off the ends of the frame and appear again on the other side: where am I even? I may not know, but I hold up the artist me—the rainbow eyeball that sees all the colors—because it’s the part of me that I want everyone to notice.

I almost didn’t include this painting in the series, because the imagery feels so specific to me. But then I asked a few friends what they thought of the piece, and they each had their own story about it. None of it exactly what I intended, but some of it pretty close all the same. And it made me think that maybe the ambiguity of this image is precisely what is necessary in this case, when it’s a painting about having an unstable self-image.

This video is made with love and microdonations from my community!