FigureHeadSubject
by Alexis Knowlton

Let me introduce my self. I am a vibrating color illusion with multiple indentations for the rolling pleasure of your eyeballs. Shh! (There’s a daisy on my mouth and) I’ve got unrolled, snake and no-hair locks. I’m a looker, I’m a sucker and I touch electric.****

Please don’t call me human, since I’m right in the middle of a special effect called… “FigureHeadSubject.” This effect is hardly dimensional. It’s ecstasy, and I am coming into and slipping under.

Into and under what, you wonder? Into and under a shallow, patterned membrane below hot lights flipping grays. You see, I’m waiting there for the optical elevator that will shift my psychic organization. Imagine my body is the petrified modulation of a curtain. You position me in front of, behind, and within the curtain.

Jut my jaw, stack my nose and peach my face, but there’s nothing NATURAL about this place. I am a flimsy fact and my environment is too. One: I don’t know if I reflect or infect my landscape. Two: If you extract me from my background there’s just no thing left. Three: I am a wire frame who merely notes my own space, attempting to take hold of sensation. (Poof! See Valance.)

I can’t quite differentiate my self from my world so I’ve got painstaking fantasies of where I begin and end. These fantasies make the contour of my reptilian head reverberate inward. The contour of my reptilian head says to me, “I’ll trade you sad mimicry and bad camouflage for a real feeling.” I tell my reptilian head, “Go eat a fly!”

But the lizard’s right. I want you, spectator, feeling IT on top of seeing IT. I want your eyeball without pupil or iris like a marble over my conjugal curves, metallically shining and bound to the frame. When you scan the pearls on my necklace, when you watch the corns on my cob, I want you seeing all-over me with fine craft and touching rhythm. I am only trying to keep you from becoming a machine. The way elements repeat around me is no industrial alignment, but it does align the eyes industriously. I am trying to dislodge a thought from the eerie space between your eyes. The thought is YOUR UTTER ATOMIC INCOMPLETENESS.

Who knows how the vacuums inside and outside of me compel me. I’m always sucking in bits of stuff from out there with a straw, and the bits are always becoming me. The straw is an arm held behind my back, it’s the cube around my body, and my body looks like a sideways ocean. I learn the straw like a technology, like a breast, like a musical instrument and I radiate towards it or away from it, warping it with my heat.

Let me introduce my self again. I live in a pretty concave habitat because I wish I could suck myself up a straw, definitely, yes. What I do there is sovereignty and self-emptying. My arms embrace an empty circle inscribing me. My arms become one powerful appendage that seals my head to the edge of the universe and crowns it. Here I am, a busty mirror with chromosomes wallpapered over my open eyeballs.

CREDITS
Installation photography: Mark Woods.

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