I’m a firm believer that a piece of art carries its own motivations, its own intentions, and it’s own story outside of what its creator had intended. I know a large part of what makes an art piece meaningful is the subjective experience of the viewer interacting with it. Through my experience creating art I’ve also learned that my own subjective experience with each piece I make is evolving over time. My former bandmate and friend Barbora once said before playing one of her songs, “the meaning of this song hasn’t yet communicated itself to me”(or something along those lines) and I remember thinking...
Damn... I ain’t ever thought of it like that...
But time and time again it proves itself true. Some art seems to take on the qualities of a premonition, seeing into the future. One day you open the page to something you made 3 years ago and it is alive in the present moment more vividly than it ever could have been in its time of creation.
Flower of Modernity is this for me. At the time of its creation 2.5 years ago I made it in a rush (along with about 5 other pieces) out of scrap parts so that I could present it in an exhibit called Hot Metal Arts. I allowed my intuition to take the wheel as I abandoned my perfectionism and surrendered to the moment, welding pieces in place without concerning myself with the outcome. The piece required a name for the exhibit, and i decided on Flower of Modernity.
I’ve been learning more about modernity through my studies at Emily Carr.
Last night as I was passing by this piece in my house I had to stop myself to contemplate, given my new knowledge on Modernity, does the name still apply to this art?
I had a profound moment of truly understanding this piece for the first time.
Rising out of the maple base is a long auger drill bit, typically used for drilling concrete. It spirals upwards to meet this rusty, eroded resemblance of a failed flower of life. At the base, a corroded railroad braces it in position, as the piece appears to stand tall in anticipation, waiting for something positive to come of its situation.
To me the drill bit anchored into wood, spiralling upwards represents humanity distancing itself from nature. Through means of industrialization we move further and further to what we imagine will be humanities utopia. The flower of life is a symbol of geometric perfection, and the primary building block of the universe. In this representation it is a glitchy, incomplete, flawed attempt at creating unity within its structure, much like the reality we have created for ourselves in our increasingly modern dystopia.
FORGIVE ME for my lack of optimism at this time, but it’s hard to stay positive when we chop down the majority of the old growth forests responsible for the air we breath, and the biodiversity of our nature. We scrape the sea floors with reckless abandon to take what we need, feed those who can afford to be fed and discard the rest. We displace food production so that globalization is the only practical means for most people to maintain a holistic diet, and we blame the individual for being responsible for the monster carbon footprint left behind by industrialization, capitalism and corporate greed.
We need to pull our shit together y’all. I ain’t even talking about a Utopia, I’m talking about the basic survival of our species on this planet.
Earth gon’ be aite!
But humanity needs to decide as a collective whether we are going to be a part of the future of this planet, or just a remnant of an ancient past.