On Posture
Studio Note
I explore presence, life, reality, meaning-making, identity, agency, frameworks, and systems. Different pieces enter from different doors, but that is the territory. Some of these worlds are under great pressure. What that pressure produces, and what to call it, is the reader’s to decide.
Meaning is made in perception. The same event can be read a dozen ways depending on the frame a person brings to it. I find this endlessly interesting. It may be the thing I am most interested in, and it changes how I write.
Where I can, I try to render the thing before the verdict. I try to show what happened, or what was dreamed, or what was built, and leave the judging to you. I am not writing toward good and evil, right and wrong, who to blame and who to forgive. If I wanted to deal in verdicts, I would not need to dream. I would need a pulpit, or a platform.
The dream is the place where things arrive before the frame closes, and my work is to keep them there.
This means the work sometimes hands you something unresolved and trusts you to sit with it. You may reach for a frame. You may decide a piece is about harm, or transgression, or who wronged whom. That reach is yours to make, and I find it genuinely interesting when it happens, because the reach for meaning is part of what I am writing about in the first place.
But I will rarely make the verdict for you. I would rather give you the experience I had and let you do with it what I did, which may be something entirely your own.
So if you find yourself wanting the work to tell you how to feel about what it shows, it usually will not. That is not evasion. It is the offer. I am inviting you to meet the material the way I met it: before the frame closes, while the thing is still just itself.
On violence.
I have no pull toward violence as spectacle, victimhood as a totalizing frame, or the dramas people build around harm to soothe themselves instead of meeting the thing underneath. That is not my subject. I make work about consciousness meeting reality, and reality is sometimes a world under great pressure. So hard things happen in some of these worlds. When they do, they are the condition of the world, not the thing I set out to make.
A story may hold something broken. The story is not always about the breaking.
I will say plainly: I know that breaking is real. I am not pretending otherwise, and I am not claiming that whether a thing is harsh depends on your mood. What I am saying is narrower and truer. The events are what they are. Whether a piece is about its harshness, whether you make it a story of violence, is a frame you bring, and the bringing is yours.
A reader has the mind to find violence where the work was reaching for something else entirely. That reach is part of what I write about, so I hold no objection to it. It is simply yours, not mine.
This is also why, where it applies, I mark my work for adult readers. Not because of what it contains, but because of what it asks. This work assumes someone who can sit with the unresolved, meet an event before judging it, and take responsibility for the meaning they make of it.
That is a grown reader’s capacity, and I trust you with it. The meaning you arrive at is yours to arrive at, and yours to own.
That is the posture.
I render. You make meaning. The work lives in the space between.
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