Caprichos II

Preoccupation with identity has fueled the tribal instincts of those swallowing sectarian biases and groups clinging to their faith in abstract labels, epithets without real meaning or humane values.  Transfixed by peering into the revealing depths of a reflecting glass, one soon discovers a menagerie of unsettling personae, condensed from the soul's attempts to define its experiences of living in a world that registers its own and another person's essence from only partial perspectives on their lives.  We are all subject to the dictates of language conceptualizing the self into parcels of necessarily incomplete characteristics.  The whole is not merely more than the sum of its parts, but is so distant from the pieces that often only random glimpses of it are afforded to us.  An intense scrutiny of soul by entranced self-study reveals elements of the many strangers inhabiting our inward being, seemingly alien drives propelled by entities buried deep in the personal subconscious and in the collective unconscious, below the superficial exterior others see of us.  All individuals are collective  multiples (disassociated but linked temporary personalities), existing in the illusion of a body.  The unified person, separate from others, has never really existed; we are but the symphonic reflections of each other, assembled from the shards of a multitude of approximated identities.

 

Most of the black-and-white depictions below disclose only some of the often unseen manifestations of various personas appearing when the inquisitive artist investigates fragments of the self through the depths of an imaginary illuminating mirror.  The longer, deeper, and more carefully one searches, the more visual manifestations of ego are revealed, and even increasingly evident become the limitations of what constitutes the imprecision in misuse of the concept of "identity."  Some of the images project disturbing reflections of separate hidden impulses, while the rest of the pictures betray the visible particles of self as witnessed and encountered by others: what we think we may fear to be within us; what we fear others may intuit as the truth of what we really are.