Narrative––hermetic or lavish—is our touchstone and the only artistic strategy capable of uncloaking us to ourselves. All artworks worthy of consideration are purposing toward the same realization: confession, for art will not respond to interrogation nor provide data that can be formulated to replicate its revelations. Without a wholehearted investment of the personal, the artwork shall remain a collection of formal contrivances, initially impressive but ultimately vacuous. An artist may imply and an audience might infer but we’ve no protocol proficient––stubborn hope and arrogant insistence are simply signs of panic––in translating the taciturn object into a garish interpretation. The self, alone, is the magnetic pole and the whole of the world is drawn to it.

Our position––in various hierarchies, communities, and situations versus our reactions, assessments, and responses in relation to them––articulates our identity and motivates our agency. We must, therefore, attempt to observe ourselves from multiple points-of-view so that we might know what we look like from behind and below. Scrutinized from these angles would we recognize ourselves? It is essential then, that in order to truly know and describe our existence through art (and for that art to have emotional and intellectual currency with an audience) we must embody countless different selves, then examine the view from there.

If our gaze is immutably fixed, adamant in judgment, we risk blinding ourselves to more expressive and eloquent idioms, all of them potentially ours.