illuminaughty machine: Solo exhibition at Red Space Gallery

Yesterday my solo exhibition, Illuminaughty Machine opened at Red Space Gallery here in Austin, TX. The space, which is run by Caitlin McCollom and Carlos Acevedo, featured a new site-specific installation composed of various smaller sculptural elements.

Artist Statement:

Writhing with spiritual science, wires, philosophy and electricity, Illuminaughty Machine is my deus ex machina defining the inexplicable forces of attraction and sexual desire and the questions surrounding those urges. What is it that determines our attraction to one individual over another?

The sci-fi fueled concepts enveloping this installation reflect science's current status in our society. Altered from its once revered status of answering profound questions and providing guidance to our self-inflicted ills, now it is treated as another religious threat encroaching on Christianity’s territory.

Crucial to this work, ideas pertaining to philosophy of the mind, as it purports a dualistic nature of our physical and mental selves, suggest that the two can be bridged with this pseudo-spiritual-technology. This “machine” has no physical means of output therefore the creator waits for his Godot.

The invisible act of constructing this “machine” is merely alluded to, but just as birds instinctively know how to build nests, its creation through some inherent behavior is at the core of this work. It’s as though I have always known how, in accordance with Platonic Epistemology, and just now remembered.

This work discusses things otherworldly and spiritual via visual psychobabble. It weaves together the ideas of spirituality, science and our guttural, primal selves.

Illuminaughty Machine is a concrete approach to an immaterial question.