Detail: Basement

Detail: Basement, 2010. 30" x 30". Acrylic on canvas.

"We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others."
- Albert Camus

This painting is a depiction of the feelings brought on from my inability to get back into architecture. The void left in myself is the basement the Corinthian capital and my self portrait now inhabit in the picture. At the top of the plane there is a section of a floor that, as it creeps into the middle, turns into a jagged nightmarish version of itself. The floor has given way, crumbled and broken and the human figure has fallen into this dankness below. This dark space is tilted. The planes that suggest its boundaries are dynamically on angle.

Thrown into this exile, parts have been labeled as in an architectural drawing. The architectural leaders, the arrows, become little spears that jab and call out all faults. Four descriptors have been highlighted, the four are names of places. Mantua is where fortune's fool Romeo was sent into exile for killing Tybalt. In Euripides' play Medea, the title character is exiled to Corinth. Ovid, the roman poet was sent into exile to a remote village called Tomis. Napoleon Bonaparte was shipped to the island of Elba. All of these places existed far outside the sphere civilization in their days. It was a fate worse than death. In the painting I have played with their usage: MANtua is grouped with boy, CORINTH is included in the label of Corinthian capital, TOMIS is made into 'to mistake', and ELBA is a play on elbow.

As in the Camus quote I have tried to transform this gap away from something I dedicated myself to so fully. Five years of study and three of practice as well as an entire life leading up the decision to pursue architecture can seem to eradicate any self worth once it is taken away. All I can do is keep steady in my hunger. To hope that the dregs of this yield satiate the need to transform a negative something into something positive.