-Failure comes up so often in everyday life; people fail all the time and most, if not all, of the time it is scoured and hated. Failure in society is seen as the ultimate in falling short, the supreme negative. Its actually hard to descried in the world without using the word failure. When a failure occurs it can be crushing and defeating. As a young athlete I was taught at an early age to despise failure and avoid it. The funny thing is that no matter how hard you try failure is unavoidable. In a way it is like death, no one wants to acknowledge it but in reality it is inevitable, for everyone. Sex also shares a similar fate in that it is considered not right or frowned upon by an overall society, thus forcing people to discover it and handle it themselves. Death, sex and failure are the three big
DON'Ts in our world, however in reality they are forces that are impossible to avoid. The end result is a majority of people unable to deal with death, sex and failure. As a result it is my intention to bring light to failure and question the validity of its existence. Several times as a high school wrestler my opponents were individuals who, for lack of a better term, kicked ass at wrestling. They'd been wrestling since birth and as a high school junior had more muscles than
Sven Carlson, and they were my opponents. Needless to say they destroyed me. I knew I was going to fail and yet when I did I still was affected by it, I still felt disillusioned by it. Why is this? Its because failure is taught to be failure, expected or unexpected, avoidable or inevitable, failure is failure.
So my mechanism for accepting this failure became my ability to laugh at it, and I encourage others to laugh at their failures because once we find humor in it we can get over it and hopefully learn from it.
There is also a sadistic side to me, as well as many other people, where we find the failure of others to be humorous. It is that humor that attracts me and connects to the other elements in my work. The more absurd the failure is the more humorous it is. Failure can often look painful, physically or otherwise, but as a 3rd party we often laugh. I call this the "haha, ooooo" effect.
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Wrong Fix Bowl #16"x 1'x 1' - Broken Ceramic bowl, ^04 fired Earthenware, Red Iron Oxide (Fe
2O
3) wash. 10/09
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Wrong Fix Chair #31:30- Video- 10/09
-A piece about fixing an object in absurd ways, in ways that are futile or fruitless. Sometimes hopelessness is funny when you see it from a third perspective. This is a reminder to step back from our stress, our frustration, from the pressures of life and see how silly we really are.
