Take Me To The

Artist’s Statement

There was a lot of change in the year and a half during which I was working on ‘Partly False Prophet’. Some of it was personal – a breakup, the death of a close friend, a new apartment. Some was at scale – an intensifying national turn towards fascism, the early stages of an economic recession, international genocide. Established meanings proved inadequate to this moment; new ones had not yet solidified out of the imaginative ether. 

As I grieved and laughed and raged my way through this landscape in time and space, I found myself in conversation with myths, traditions, and archetypal stories. Ancestors have crossed aeons with a whisper on the wind, speaking prophecies of their long-complete, still-living stories. They warned me against skipping ahead to the end, while simultaneously comforting me that the process of becoming is as old as time itself, a story I will tell true by nature of my human being. Out of symbols, surrenderings, mundanity, and wonder spring meanings I found and created in equal measure. Listen closely, they said, and then were silent. 

The project of meaning cannot be experienced second-hand, and so ‘Partly False Prophet’ does not present the conclusions of my search. Telling you who I think I am is terribly uninteresting in the face of your own journey of creation and discovery. So instead, ‘Partly False Prophet’ offers a methodological map; a record of creative detritus; an empty hall full of cracked-open doors between here and forever. Listen closely to the silence in the margins, and it will lead you to the truths you forgot that you have always known.