AMALGAM II

We are the accumulation of our experiences.

If you were to forget every single thing that happened to you in life, you’d immediately cease to exist. At best, you’d become a new person, and would begin a new process of absorption of experiences; at worst, you’d be unable to function at full capacity as an adult in a world that expects you to understand yourself to some extent after your teenage years. Memories are crucial not just to form a personality, but to learn to negotiate with our own morality and ethics, and to use that negotiation in order to understand ourselves better, as well as our actions.

The things that you see and process in your life will inevitably result in the formation of opinions. This is where your individuality emerges. It is when you grab your opinions and moral compass and merge it with the flow of society, that is, the thousands of people in your vicinity who are engaged in the same process, that we can subtract a path forward. We measure our experiences, good and bad, and deliberate. This is why we talk and why we write and read books. We explore our own life as well as that of others, and we distill the path of least suffering in order to be able to grow.

This piece can be seen as a celebration, reminder, and prayer to the idea of memory. Our identity is the things that happen to us in life, and the meditation of the experiences can yield different facets of our self. Amalgam II is an exploration of growth through existential sacrifice. You see images of candles, ritual fire, gratitude, sadness, and travel. These are experiences that the artist meditates on as he creates this dissected body, but he invites you to reflect on your own experiences, pair them and compare them with this body, and reflect on which are important to you and who you are. In the process the artist hopes to bring awareness to the key memories in your life, their importance, and their utilization moving forward. We today are not our past, but we are definitely directly affected by it.