I am often asked what some of my work 'means', and I am always reluctant to reply. This is only because I am a firm believer that what a piece of artwork means is a personal thing. That individual personal experience is, to me, much more interesting and important than what I think the piece means, and explaining what the piece means to me will inevitably have an effect on your experience with it. I want your experience with my work, for better or worse, to be unencumbered by the knowledge of my intentions. However, I understand that the curiosity is always going to be there, and being a fan of art as well as an artist, I feel that same curiosity toward other's works I enjoy.
So, I will say this: I am fascinated by mystery and the mysterious, and I think that this fascination is sort of a living remnant of childhood that I am reluctant to let go of. More than that, actually, I actively seek it out through my work. That feeling of wonder is spiritual in nature; Freud would call it an 'oceanic' feeling (though he would also attach this to religious spirituality, which is not what I am referring to). It's a recognition that there is an unknowable, a celebration of limitations, a happy departure from reason, a rejection of quantification, of index, of classification, and most importantly, of that which is comme il faut. We all have something that keeps us from being what or who we want to be; some sort of tie to the systematic social order, whether we know it or not. All you have to do is start to quit those ties.
Shooting the QUIT series was a lot of fun for me, and I think it was fun for the talent as well. For a brief moment they were asked to remember that childlike euphoria.
Here are some BTS images. Photography by Alejandro Photography
