STATEMENT OF WORK

Where the direct way was lost, in the middle of the journey of our life, I quietly took to the ship; I came to myself. I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. How wild! I cannot well repeat how there I entered. Some years ago. (For again, the straightforward pathway had been lost).

Avail me the study, for in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern. Rough and stern. With bashful forehead, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say! Who willingly acquires hungerings?

Though I cannot tell why this was exactly, I recall all the circumstances: false and lying gods, or the Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States, every road, art, my soul—she brought upon me so much heaviness… they all secretly dogged me, and influenced me in some unaccountable way.

Endless processions of all my curiosity: a nature so malign and ruthless—so bitter! How we consign ourselves to perdition! Thrust me back thither where the undeliverable, nameless perils did not give me fear; where thou shalt hear the desperate lamentations. Fleeing onward, I will leave thee on shore; my weary body turns to the water perilous.

No. When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, so that I may escape this woe. Washed by waves, and cooled by breezes! Why goest thou back to such annoyance that have impelled me to explore thy volume? It is out of this experiment to paint you that the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open and the fear a little quieted.

(Again, I always go to sea as a sailor).

[Above text composed of selections from: Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 1 & Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1867, canto 1 -- cut-up and rearranged by Ian Miyamura]

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It is with space represented in image that the viewer no longer perceives a world from which they are the origin of coordinates, but instead a world they must navigate as one point among many others. Dispossessed of an egocentric perspective, literally no longer sure of where to place oneself, my paintings throw the viewer into the ungraspable; the bleak-yet-fertile state of image proliferation that supplements the contemporary lostness of existence. We, with our so many distances; our so many levels of removal from which we engage with the act of creation and viewing, may not even be able to believe in a difference between a Hawaiian shirt abstraction and a painting of a broken plate.