Disarticulated Subjectivity and Embodiment Revised

Embodiment Revised, 24” x 18”, oil and acrylic on paper and canvas, 2025

These two works interrogate the instability of representation by staging the body as both a site of figuration and a field of material rupture. The seated figure is of a woman, but the face and chest collapse into painterly accretions of opaque, geological textures. In this gesture, the conventions of portraiture are destabilized, reorienting the body toward a condition of fragmentation rather than wholeness.

The insertion of layered, mineral-like surfaces interrupts the continuity of skin and facial recognition, producing a visual language of erosion, stratification, and repair. Her folded hands suggest repose, but their calmness is unsettled by the instability of the head and torso where subjectivity traditionally resides. Here, those loci of identity are obscured, dispersed into sedimentary abstraction.

Positioned within my related exploration of “art-beings,” these works emphasize how subjectivity can be read as a layered archive rather than a singular presence. By collapsing figural representation with material intrusions, the paintings underscore the tension between embodiment and disintegration, presence and absence, the human and the geological.

The title Disarticulated Subjectivity reflects the way this figure resists coherence. The body is present, yet fractured at the very sites where identity is usually anchored, in the chest and the face. In this disruption, subjectivity is not erased but unsettled, dispersed into layers of material and memory, leaving the figure suspended in a liminal psychological space.

Embodiment Revised suggests a body that is present but unsettled, caught in the act of being rewritten. Recognizable in gesture yet fractured at the chest and face, the figure reveals embodiment as provisional, unstable, and open to disruption.

Detail (Disarticulated Subjectivity)

Detail (Disarticulated Subjectivity)

Detail (Embodiment Revised)

Body System II

A female torso, cropped and fragmented, bears an abdominal cavity that evokes both wound and womb, an opening that is at once vulnerable and generative.

Within this recess, the presence of a handmade butterfly transforms the site into a chamber of metamorphosis. The pearlescent paint within carries associations of fertility, and this interplay between anatomy and material suggests the possibility of reproduction, gestation, or the spark of life, yet it remains suspended between biological reference and symbolic ambiguity.

In relation to the earlier Body System I, which emphasized the merging of body and canvas, this work extends the inquiry into questions of reproduction, destruction, and the continuity of life. The butterfly (fragile, ephemeral, yet enduring as a symbol of transformation) emerges from the concavity as if life itself could be conceived within the painted body.

Body System II underscores the paradox of the body as both archive and future: a vessel that bears scars of rupture while also carrying the latent potential for renewal.

Detail from an angle

Detail

Intermission No. 51

This painting embodies the elemental force of heat, not through depiction of fire but through its very material presence. Layers of oil and acrylic have been scraped, scarred, and built into ridges that resemble fissures in a scorched environment. At the center, a luminous field of yellows and oranges glows with the intensity of molten heat, as if the canvas itself were ignited from within.

Part of my series exploring the canvas as a living body, the work draws on the deep histories of material and myth. Where clay has often signified life’s origins in my other related pieces, here the element of heat represents transformation: destruction and renewal, collapse and rebirth. The painting radiates a core vitality that smolders beyond the edge of its surface, blurring the line between inert matter and animate force.

Like other works in the series, this piece becomes an “art-being,” an entity that refuses to remain silent as object, instead radiating its own energy, like an ember of existence made visible.

Detail

Detail

The Reader

In The Reader, a solitary figure sits against a rough wall, their form blurred into shadow, holding books or a sheet of paper whose contents remain hidden. Above, a pale cloth stretches across a clothesline, hovering between the ordinary act of laundry and the theatrical gesture of a stage curtain. The red color on the wall introduces a note of disturbance that cannot really be explained, like a memory or event that lingers without clarity.

The act of “reading” and what is actually happening here is ambiguous. The figure could be absorbing information from reading something, or they might be merely holding reading material. The draped fabric could be shielding them from the world, or it could be exposing them on display like on a theater stage. The figure’s indistinct features deny individuality, transforming them into an anonymous person in an unknowable narrative.

As in other paintings in this series, instead of individual portraits, the figures become placeholders, archetypes caught between presence and absence. Here, the act of reading is transformed into a metaphor for interpretation itself: the impossibility of ever fully knowing what is being absorbed, what is being withheld, and what has already been lost.

Detail

Detail