PUBLICATIONS 03.

PHOTO:GEORGE KANIS

there is no fixed you,
just a more real you

HOW TO GRUNT
WITH HURRICANE ALEXANDER

08–08–2024

What would it look like if your inner child was suddenly struck with the trials and tribulations of adulthood all at once, and in response, crawled out from the depths of your soul, full of rage, fuming over innocence lost, to scream, cry, and cum all over? This is the sort of scene I aim to capture and portray in my artwork.

My name is HURRICANE ALEXANDER.

Imagine A Rage Scene; Bird Meets Bird, Birds Build Nest, Bird Rapes Bird ... and Now We’re Scrambling an Omelet!

Feeling the way I’m feeling just isn’t going to cut it. Every day I open my eyes to a half-eaten bowl of melted frozen yogurt, with chocolate sauce smeared across my pillow. The footpath to the spree sparkles below my window, the way it sometimes does in Summer, and the birds are back to their old tricks.

I hide beneath my blankets and pretend I don’t give a damn.

Screech, squawk, kick, squeal.
Screech-grip, bitch. Screak-squeal, bitch.

Scream, bitch; Bellyache.

The Hurricane,
A ‘Forever' Scream

As the inner child ascends to the tip of your psyche, ALL OTHER CONCEPTIONS OF SELF HIDE IN FEAR .

Rage, Rage, Rage, Rage ...

... Something alive – An artist acts as the roots of a plant, traveling deep within themselves and their intimate surroundings to get in contact with the thoughts, experiences and emotions society has tried to numb into nonexistence. The blossoming flower (a poisonous flower) carries the wisdom of personal trauma and heartache to provide a more precise articulation of immense and immensely human questions, such as,
Why am I the way that I am? The flower is the art, (a weapon, a question, a challenge), and the fruit it generates is the impact on the audience, which makes space for other roots to take hold.

Art, to me, is passion – a passion for curiosity, complexity, and controversiality. ... I’m thinking of things less tangible, more cerebral ... thinking all physical artwork is merely a placeholder, a symbol, for the real horrors/wonders within ourselves.

Consider art as something dangerous – it breaks the backbones of tradition and normality, planting the seeds for radical, alternative thinking and cultural awareness.

How many colorful, square canvases does it take to make you completely sick of the art industry? For me, the answer is essentially one; I’m DYING for something real, something new, and I know I’m not alone.

When an artist makes it clear that they never intended to do things the way they’ve always been done, presenting work that is inherently uncategorizable (not painting, not sculpture, not performance, and not linked to any obvious era, icon, or concept in art history), it opens up a large hole/portal/invitation in which the viewer can attempt to fill in the gaps and write their own, fresh story.

Scream bitch, scream bitch; SCREAM!

The Large, Erect Penis | The First Cumming

At the very tip of the iceberg is fear, sure, but fear is complicated. Raw fear has the power to send us spiraling backwards, way back, directly to those intensely haunting memories from adolescence. In moments of fragility, our eccentric imagination can easily become our reality, consequently, our deepest, darkest fears can creep outside the dream world and settle into the world of the “real.”

You wake up in the middle of the night in a puddle of piss. The room is pitch black, you are alone. In the shadowy corner stands a strange man, watching you, slowly moving closer. As he glides across the room, the moonlight illuminates his naked body, exposing his large, erect penis. Suddenly, there is a rapid shift from terror to fantasy as the man straddles you on the bed. In this moment, fear becomes a turn on for you, and this scares you too – scared of the dark, scared of being alone, and scared of yourself too ... but you’re not alone.

Your mother wakes up, fearing you’re in danger, sensing the nightmare, and catches you masturbating. She watches, through the crack in the door, as you climax for the very first time. In that specic moment, you notice two eyes flash in the doorway, then disappear, and footsteps down the hall. Confused, you imagine yourself through Mother’s eyes – little you, covered in piss and cum and terribly frightened, and you don’t know what to do ... And you don’t know how to feel ...

What can you do? What can you feel?

With this image in mind, you can probably tell I have a thing for perversion and perverts and even the full circle: perverting things so heavily that they arrive back at a place of normalcy, a satirical and naive place. I want to encourage art-viewers to push far past personal comfort zones and traditional artistic analysis, and ultimately succumb to “the bizarre,” that which subsists uniquely in the kaleidoscope sentiment of the viewer. Fear, paranoia, isolation and the curse of creativity is the cocktail being served, which, after a few big sips, can be boiled down to an all-embracing human narrative of shame and self-deception. It’s no wonder my work corkscrews simultaneously into places of downright horror and naive silliness; it’s here, in this “both” zone, where monsters, such as the monsters I’ve encounter on my journey with Bipolar Disorder and Depression, establish a rhythm and independence that allows them to be examined precisely and challenged radically.

I walk into the room and pull down my underwear. The room goes quiet.

I call this The Large, Erect Penis Effect, where the presence of a large, erect penis at a party makes people dumb. Dumb as a box of rocks. It’s a similar thing to pulling out a gun, I guess, but even more menacing. In the right setting, however, with the right people, the mood gets dumb and ... happy. Happy as a box of rocks!

The “Me,” The “You,” The “Other”

While constructing my nightmarish playgrounds, I like to think a lot about taboos; what extremely intimate, “forbidden” topic can I allow myself to think deeply about and express authentically? What can be said about what can’t be said? ... I like to tease established taboos with a really wet tongue, (Slurrrp!), grappling with mental illness, sex, and madness in the modern world, focusing on dangerously personal and suggestive details, almost in the tone of,

Isn’t it crazy that this is real ... that this is happening? Isn’t it crazy that you’re real / Does it scare you that you’re not? / Isn’t it crazy that you’re crazy / Does it scare you that you’re not? ..

I sit in the rocking chair in the back of the game room in the rehabilitation center, writing: THINK ABOUT A CUM SOCK – the sensation of thrusting a penis into a dirty, old sock, stiff from overuse, and cumming, and keeping that sock on your bedside table, or better, in a secret little drawer.

I write: REMEMBER COLLAPSING ON THE KITCHEN FLOOR AND SOBBING INTO A BOWL OF FROSTED FLAKES, shoving spoonfuls of cereal into your mouth between gasps, and noticing an old postcard hiding underneath the fridge.

It was a letter from your sister.

Remember?

And the sight of it made your stomach turn.

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”

By posing hard truths related to the cycles of abuse we impose on ourselves, art and artists have the ability to pull pain, “pain” as a concept, away from bland discourses like “I’m suering because life is hard,” or, “I’m hurting because this and that happened to me,” and position pain directly in the gut of the beholder, meaning ratify the emotional, soulful warfare that exists on the inside, and continue to map out these webs of pain across multiple terrains of existence, ultimately acknowledging its more meticulous and universal characteristics.

I WANT TO TELL A STORY THAT IS REAL.

Really real ... Remember?

Through fullness and depth, I hope to move audiences swiftly past shock value, or use shock value and sex appeal as bait, like cheese on a mousetrap, and eventually arrive upstream, at a root cause, exposing a much more expansive evil. The audience is urged to help shift the cultural narrative from a place of abysmal numbness to one of openness, not by extending a helping hand to others, but by actively destroying emotional and intellectual blockages within themselves. The path forward is uncertain simply because it has to be, because we have to build it. Therefore, the nuanced fear tied to identity existentialism and what is considered “good” or “normal,” or “me” or “you,” aka fear of the other versus fear of the “other” within ourselves, is at the core of my work.

Urgency & The Ticking Clock

Certainly, the terrain of depression is bursting with obstacles and intricacies unimaginable to the stable mind.

All it took was one really big dick to knock me off the face of the earth ...
Not really.

What I meant to say is: All it took was one really bad acid trip in my sophomore year of university to truly knock me off the face of the earth; I fell so deeply into paranoia and delusional thinking, my self-harming tendencies, blah-blah-blah ... blah. Pushing through that darkness, I had countless revelations concerning the urgency of emotion and self-expression in the face of a mental illness epidemic and an imposed MASS SILENCING. I believe that it’s extremely urgent to express yourself while you can, and to talk about mental illness in a way that expresses just how rich and poetic, yet severe and life-altering it can be.
For a while, growing up, I thought suicide would be the worst outcome of my mental illness, but that’s not so true. I used to function like a trauma magnet, actively seeking out risky and regrettable situations, inventing more creative ways to self-sabotage, filling my numbness with anything, everything, overstimulating a mind that really needed to rest, just looking for another reason to give up, all the while hiding my pain and my self from others. This is the worst. Only by incorporating my battle with Bipolar Disorder into my creative process have I been able to maintain stability. By confronting that version of myself, the scared little boy, spiraling towards rock bottom, I am able to navigate my depressive inner world with compassion and curiosity, and somehow forgive my younger self while also legitimizing the internal chaos which once drove him mad. I carry me, my delicate boy, very closely today. I do not aim to get “better” anymore; there is no better. (Slurrrp!)

We Grunt When We’re Manic!

I often submerge myself in the fluid of depression/psychosis in my work; this often looks like a bloody, oily, gross concoction of liquids smeared across my body and the floor and walls. Treating my body as a canvas and a corpse helps unify multiple realms of being; my work is not a mere product of my mind, but rather is my mind, or even more, is my mind once I’ve lost my mind.

(In my case, one should not be able to separate the art from the artist).

In the daytime, I’m a man, in the night, I’m a monster, but at the end of it all, I’m just a boy. Just a child. I have eyes like woodpeckers, hollowing out the world around me, putting holes in reality. I have an imagination that can make a grown man sick to his stomach.

Because you (grunt when you’re manic) tortured you –
Poor tortured you
You torture your
self senseless

And it just so happens that I (grunt when I’m manic) tortured me –
I know I tortured me
Poor tortured me
I torture me

Torture me
Tortured me
Tortured

A Societal Ache/Rot

Art-making is less of a cathartic process and more of an educational one for me; it is a blunt reminder and validation of just how twisted our thinking processes can become when our depression takes over, as well as a reminder that the full spectrum of emotions is valuable; all sensitivities are worthy of investigation, and falling deeper into our “challenging” emotions oftentimes brings us closer to ourselves and to what it means to be alive. With this mindset, the inherent suering of being alive, of having a body that aches, a brain that aches, is the primary building blocks of connection and community. By boldly sharing our own personal encounters with emotional and mental torment, our own unhinged delusions, intrusive thoughts, thoughts of non-belonging, hopelessness, self-sabotage and suicide, we can all actively strengthen the bonds between the people and art around us.

It is common to feel trapped within oneself as a person suffering from mental illness, but it is crucial to recognize that we are trapped first and foremost within society (capitalism, societal norms, binary systems of oppression, etcetera). It is an artist’s job to draw parallels between these invisible cages, exposing our traumas and exposing our bravery by being able to point our fingers outward, and upward, dismantling suffering on all levels, at all scales, bit by bit, in a life-long search for collective clarity and liberation.

XO HURRICANE ALEXANDER

PHOTO:GEORGE KANIS

HURRICANE ALEXANDER

is an installation/performance/chaos artist whose work centers around queer violence, mental illness, and the private lives of fear. Their work exists as a congregation of symbolic screams, some silent, internal, while others quite loud, erupting vulgarly into the outside world. The heart-wrenching solitude they experienced throughout adolescence, growing up queer and neurodivergent in rural America, the feeling of wanting to escape but needing to hide, fuels their creative process.

HURRICANE aims to blur the line between tragedy and satire, allowing playful absurdity to creep into spheres of paranoid horror. The fictitious evolution from gifted child to gifted adult self-destructs and rapidly mutates, along with the artist’s understanding of art itself, and their confounding desire to be, in its most radical form, artless. Through the regurgitation of their deeply persuasive manic-depressive episodes, HURRICANE strives to unearth and devour the intimate vulnerabilities of each art-viewer/audience in an attempt to reclaim our own humanness.

UPCOMING SHOWS

Solo Exhibition
New Fears Gallery September 20, 21, 22
Reichenberger Str. 114, 10999 Berlin

PAST MOLT SHOWS

06-10-2023
1 - 800 - MEOW - MEOW

28-04-2024
BUNKBED BUTTSEX

06-01-2023
INNSURRECTION

CONTACT
IG: hurricane_season2
Email: schaef.alexander@gmail.com