PHENOMENAL AESTHETICS

Our daily lives in large are mundane. They consist of routine, habituation, and menial repetitive acts.

*break* Repeat, repeat, repeat, each word typed to distinctly decode our own repetition, our own repetitions. *break*

   We have anniversaries, birthdays, holidays set on a calendar, set in time. We go to work, come home, eat dinner, sleep and repeat. Each day lapses into the next, but at times we are able to glimpse into other realities and trace the magnificence of otherwise mundane events. It may be a puddle reflecting the sky above, a slow breeze dancing with the summer foliage, or a casual encounter with an old friend. Some call it chance, some divinity, some god, but despite the name it is in these collisions that we are able to see through the gaps of our own reality. We are looking into an inversion where beauty can be found and truth unveiled. Within the gap greatness waits. It is what we strive for when we create, when we love, when we explore. Beauty, the aesthetic of greatness, is derived from the gap of two intersecting phenomena passing through the fragments of our combined experiences.

   It is in this gap, this divergence of two trajectories where we find truth, or inversely the root of a lie. It is the removal of a veil to find a new one, and in that illumination we reconfigure our own image and must adjust ourselves to better suit a new reality. However, in this search of these phenomena we, as humans, will go to great extents both physically and mentally to obtain inclusion into these parallel worlds. Drugs, sex, music, and art all attempt to alleviate the habituation of life and illuminate the gap of reverence. It is this insatiable need and search of this gap that humanity becomes intoxicated with the need for the presence of definable divinity.

   However, it is only temporarily obtainable. The gap, this space, this moment, this experience is like a sheet of dimensionless paper and the plane it comprises takes the form of a dimensionless mask. It becomes a surface that hides and illuminates the internalization of form. To distinguish one side from the other only inverts the relationship and like a mirror we are looking out in on our own actions. Within the gap we are consumed by the expanse of minutia, but the plane is fractal, temporary, and elusive. Once it has been found it disappears from the surface and reseeds.

*break* It is in the hunt we hunger for the kill. *break*

Thus the mask, as a surface, has neither origin nor trajectory. It simple persists between realities like mortar between bricks and when it fails, the mask is lifted.

*break* Given time, I took the time, and it was just. *break*

   Phenomenal aesthetics, as an inclusion to the discovery of magnificence must be perceived as a mask in of itself. It is not present in a single form or proportion, but in the search, and in the entirety of the work. Through it the viewer can see into a parallel reality that is both theirs and mine. My work is a curated representation of this phenomenal aesthetics and as such is curated in an attempt to discover and present the mask itself. It is of course my creation, but I have created it for the appetite of the viewer and it is in this creative act that the viewer must don the mask and enter the void to properly “see.” By allowing ourselves to see and step into the void it is my assertion that the dimensionless plane be approached as both experientially distinct from person to person and simultaneously allowing for the discovery of universal truths we all share. Curating the relationships between the fragments is essential to the entirety of the experience. No one piece is non consequential to the finality of the whole. Each section is a glimpse into the purity of process that strives for finality and brings a personal clarity to the internal structure. Through a personal construction of the whole we can find a universal footing that is bound within a mask, within the mundane, the habitual.

*break* Between realities I found an inconsequence. I was burdened by the inconclusiveness of my own gestation and yet satisfied to sit among the divinity it allowed me. So I persist. Body and mind mixed, like cocktails, between the lie and a truth. Singular and Plural. Actresses inversions. *break*

Behind and within the mask the user, myself, is able to see new realities that were veiled till presented through the lens of inclusion. This inclusion is a demand of all work. For work generates product, and product is consumable, and consumption feeds the work. So to deny the inclusion of our appetites is to deny the process and dissolve finality. Despite my aversion to finality, it is an extent of human nature to finalize the product regardless of the work itself and as such my work reconciles this contradiction through the curation.

*break* Two sound-tracked overlap. One left one right, the cacophony is indecipherable, yet clarifies the silence. *break*

This dissolution of the process, of time, engenders a need for immediacy and the search that separates products. This act of separation allows for the organization of ideas and the exclusion of others while still allowing our thoughts to manifest new masks and build new planes to stand upon. Regardless of their temporarily.

*break* The house. Doors, windows, bedrooms, a kitchen, feet, traffic, a city cloisters in a station of the person. What freedom we have to exist in our homes. *break*

   It is in the house however, that I believe that the temporarily of our lives is of our own control. This direct and untenable control of our surroundings forces architecture to carry the heavy burden of maintaining its integrity and yet remain in a state of active stasis. These contradictory forces manipulate the building to amalgamate, grow, expand, change, at an unpredictable pace or better yet, changes set to the cycles of lives. Thus the phenomenal experience of the space must bend to the will of the occupant, and yet is unmoved. In this mental space we are obliged to live with the tangled experiences of our everyday. These realities create a dynamic of experiential efficiency that is derived from the temporarily of phenomenal aesthetics. Theses aesthetics are defined by our everyday lives and allow a broadening context of experiences.

*tangent* This point of expansion and contraction, of the manipulation of space holds many of the same principles of a capitalistic economy. The suburbs were bought on credit, on the hope of what they could provide the future. We see the now to take the future. Architecture builds this realization, but in a capitalistic system, when do / how do we stop? Can we? Should we? *tangent*

   Returning to the house, the home, architecture creates the bounds for human occupation. It is the act of occupation that allows for the construction of economic, cultural, legal principles that seem beyond our control. However inside the home, free from the trivialities of the everyday the relative static appropriation of space allows us to resituate our own person hood against the realities we have created. Within the home phenomenal aesthetics finds footing. It becomes the spaces where humanity exercises its will and hope is palpable. It is the access to hope that demands the home is a place of refuge, of escape, of safety. Of course architecture cannot demand this upon its residence, but it must allow for and build the space where it can occur.

SCREEN PLAY

MASKS OF OUR PAST

SACRED IN THE MUNDANE