Adrift, acrylic
CJ Hunt
Seaside High School | Junior
In my art, I try to express a more intuitive understanding of human experience through abstract or abstracted imagery. This piece, for example, is a meditation on social isolation. Locked in our homes and observing passively as all our social links slowly unravel, we see that the sociality of the human species is more than an incidental form of organization but rather an intrinsic and necessary characteristic of our nature.
The individual is not meant to function as an isolated unit, but as a part of the whole of society. Separated from the psychosocial whole, we find ourselves lethargic and lost, adrift in the timeless and meaningless grey void where society used to be. There is a deep ennui of isolation, both terrifying and mundane in its annihilation of normal emotional being. Adrift in a grey space without any institutions in it to instill life with meaning, the mind floats and loses track of itself. Simultaneously it wants both to do something, to relieve its boredom, and to do nothing, to relieve its exhaustion. The human self becomes abstracted- for by what can it define itself when it loses all relation to the rest of humanity and its larger and more concrete institutions? It floats without conscious will, only somewhat sure of its own existence or its own shape, as the stuff of ideas begins to take on an ever larger and more terrifying degree of dominance over its experienced reality. As the self itself becomes ever vaguer and less sure, its ideas become more and more seemingly real and loom over it like basilisks, like aimless masses of garish color writhing against a grey backdrop without value.