Thursday Entry: Existential Pleasure


In another class we watched “Worst Possible Illusion,” a clip on Vik Muniz’s website. He comfortably discussed his creative process with confidence and ease, freely contributing youthful humor, packaged by an indisputable charm. Being a native of Brazil has influenced the voice of initiative within his work. Among the many random and pleasantly offbeat thoughts he shared, there was a moment that resonated much curiosity within me: He admitted to being an escapist. And, similar to meeting strangers reminiscent of people you already know, I had to look up the definition almost immediately to understand this connection I felt with his very brief and casual confession.

I came across Ernst Bloch, a German social philosopher who evaluated it as an “immature, but honest substitute for revolution.”

In situations where the mind and the body are in separate places, the soul is forced to levitate through the space in between. Arriving at this suspended state, the idea of something breaking or broken becomes re-definable; the past and the future are irrelevant, as the present seems suspended through the object’s current form. Our rigid minds accustomed to visualizing these abandoned fragments as drifting apart, we ignorantly begin to assign their destinies. It may not be a product of ignorance as much as it is a consequence of habit.

I seem to be obsessed with this notion and hope to find ways of capturing it. My Isolation series dealt with the tension of defining solitude in an attempt to rid the word of its gloominess with a warm and accepting embrace. I hope to further explore these ideas of separation and the states in between, as well as perception’s responsibility for the distance
measured overall.

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