With images, one can ingest, and ingest, and ingest, and all the while, still crave more.

Finding similarities between images has become an obsessive part of my practice. The need to know, did another artist feel something familiar and depict it more clearly than I’ve been able to comprehend in my own life? How many times has a script played out before - in a slightly different tune? What does it mean for me to put all those tunes together and try to create some form of (dis)harmony?

In Jérémie Koering’s book, Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images, he talks about how Egyptian priests poured water down statues of their gods. They would then offer that liquid, to the ill, as medicine to ingest. Koering also mentions that the Egyptians licked images off of bodies of the dead too. While it may come across as grotesque to contemporary standards, there’s an intimacy between bodies and minds in the hopes of transferring and holding onto an image’s inherent power. Art history feels like one long communion of artists, digesting, and regurgitating both humor and horror, in order to heal in the face of grotesqueness. 

Horror can be personal, but some aspects of it are universal. Paul McCarthy mentions in an interview “Maybe it’s a conditioned response: we’re taught to be disgusted by our fluids. Maybe it’s related to a fear of death.” With this in mind, I’ve been wondering what it looks like to embrace regurgitation through art history in order to hold discomfort a little closer in my own life.

I keep returning to Medieval Renaissance paintings, Persian miniatures, Goya, Hogarth, Klee, Ensor, Bruegel, and Munch. They all compile a multiplicity of emotions in space, with grotesque satire and magical realism. To me, they prove, a singular image can hold the tension of multiple dichotomies. 

In miniatures it's not uncommon to see an image, literally split in two like a comic with borders. The top of the painting may depict a landscape, and then directly below it, is an image of a person on fire, and surrounded by demons. Stylistically the top may feel more mimetic, and the bottom crude and roughly depicted. Between the image’s disjointed technique and subject matter, it's an operatic melodrama flipping the viewer between mundanity and terror, through time and space. 

In images like these, there’s an innate understanding that one can’t sanitize life. As strange as it is, death, discomfort, slime, ooze, it’s here for all of us, in the same way that beauty can be. Accepting this form of emotional transience in artwork has been helpful for me. If artists have always thought life was grappling with multiplicity…then it’s only natural to ask, if things get stranger from here, how is that going to upend me? But, there’s always another image to uncover that’s singing a similar tune of unease to guide the way through.