I haven't taken these poor things out of their glass to properly photograph them, but capturing graphite well is always a hopeless headache even without glass, so these mushy snapshots will serve, just so --.
I make copies of most things I make.
This need to manufacture doppelgangers, mirrored (duplicated, actually) images is, I suspect, an act of (self) portraiture, in which the intent is to collapse the subjects of the works upon one another, to create an ideal mis en abyme, a field for drunken representational play. Whether the duplication of the original enervates them both in the end (a destructive, unimaginative repetition clamoring for the stasis of originary death) or lends them a certain whiff of permanence and certainty of being (o, narcissistic intoxication!), is unclear.
I do know that, for me, the creation of the single, original image establishes the suggestion of an idea, the duplication its mastery. Or: the return to the original, its multiplication, creates cadence, a syntax. After the cadence has been written, its destruction, or deconstruction (or de-cadence) can begin.
a note jotted down recently: It is necessary, then, to so violently burn onto one's subconscious, through incessant exposure, images....so that they eventually emerge like an aura floating over the field of vision, figuring so prominently that they hover like an imaginary palimpsest in cascading, fluttering multiples, repeated visions that quiveringly exist too near the peripheral of the real to be quite Imaginary, and which, so superimposed over everything, consume everything.
Since puberty I have suffered periodically and systematically from ophthalmic migraines preceded by aura. This aura, the scintillating scotoma (fortifiation spectra, teichopsia...) is one of the most hellish and dreadful things to me, bristling with annihilating bow of lights, blinding, maddening, humiliating, often reducing me to a childish state of slobbering terror. If this illness is a metaphor, it is a temporal demonic possession. This week I endured an exceptional display of such fireworks.
Freud believed that to see - dissociatively and hysterically - into the unconscious was to trigger this unexpected blindness -- an infection of sight. As a sufferer of migraines himself, Charcot was fascinated by their visual effects and, like a number of psychiatric doctors of the day, attempted to make sense of them, to milk them for meaning. While I don't dare attempt to draw something so terrifying, others have.
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