PUBLICATIONS 03.
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.
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-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 .
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.
Consider art as something dangerous – it breaks the backbones of tradition and normality, planting the seeds for radical, alternative thinking and cultural awareness.
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.
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.”
What can you do? What can you feel?
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,
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.
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.
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.
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!)
(In my case, one should not be able to separate the art from the artist).
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.