INIQUIITES

Like most of the art I produce, it comes straight from my perception of the world around me or the way I feel. When I first thought of this sculpture it was meant to express the way I see the world evolving and devolving. Although I am not a religious person, I do read religious text and love to look at the world’s history, its rises and falls. I may be imagining it but there seems to be a pattern, maybe a lesson mankind has to learn as a whole but we somehow keep missing the plot. The people may be different, the clothes, some ideals and the technology but the cycle seems to be the same and civilizations rise through the subjugation of another and perpetuate the cycle of war, hate, famine, greed and division of man.

This piece was my interpretation of our present dilemma our SODOM AND GOMORRAH, “which is not going to be destroyed by fire and brim stone”, our possible destruction is very different. Our era in this drama seems to be so dire and grave to us, yet if we were to possibly use wisdom, we may miss the pitfall all together. The wisdom of learning from the past, of individually taking control, making a change and not relying on the powers that be, is one strategy. “Makes me wonder if all the wisdom was given to King Solomon and none left for us”, but even he faltered. So then it begs to say is there any purpose, reason or hope. Do we just literally exist and go round on a cog wheel of time.

Without straying too far from the point, there is allot of room left for speculation as to whether some of these conspiracy ideas are true. Were we just put here and are aimlessly wondering this planet. While I was doing this piece it brought up allot of question about the past, future, who we are, why we are here? How our world/universe came to be? Is this all about balance and not right or wrong? TECHNOLOGY seems to be our vice, we are moving very rapidly towards an I.ROBOT society where we become so reliant on technology, we become the vegetable scientist of the past predicted. We no longer seem to live in natural time and with nature.

The sculpture is a representation of the state we are partially in and on our way to. The robot is to encompass technology and the era of humanoid robotics we are embarking on. Although IRobot was a movie, it does seem as if it could be a likely possibility of what is to come. With the woman half the size of the robot she is being torn apart as a representation of man’s state of dismay and loss. We are as a race losing ourselves and distancing ourselves systematically from Mother Nature and our source beginnings. Whilst some technology is of use to us, there has to be a cutoff point, before we are truly on bended knees reaching out to god. Will he answer? What will the reply this time be fire, flood, earthquake….?

In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah and the Ark, Babylon………, man had been living in iniquity against the beliefs of righteousness and god-Dom. Now today our society and ways of being are also as corrupt, if not becoming so beyond necessity. The excess, to which we have now become accustomed to, is anathema to our being, with those in the 1st world living in a world of wants and desires not need. It is this lust to become lackadaisical in the mind and body that will put us at a disadvantage and lead to our ultimate demise. Within the sculpture is the tangled web, the grey area between us and the world we created. The starkness of the city is to embody the coldness of the world we are creating the future to come. How much further can we push before Mother Nature, God, Jah, Allah, the universe……………. Pushes back and the slate is wiped clean.

The colors used on the city half of the landscape are indicative of death and give a sense of the mechanicalness of the place. Whilst the nature side is evident with life, it is still dying. Technology has taken away from the human experience. It occurred to me that, what of the possibility of the humanoid robot which we seem so desperate to humanize is actualized.

We are playing gods, creating something and filling it with our flaws, what happens if and when this new world we are creating gains its own consciousness because we are trying to create intelligent beings. We are not gods or the universe so why are trying to be that.

When I created the piece it brought to the forefront a lot of question about life, philosophies on human kind and popular culture. I looked into the beliefs as to where we are coming from, those past civilizations that have been on our journey before. Atlantis was one of the most intriguing of the bunch, this city that was said to be so technologically advanced, yet they fell out of existence, is that to be our fate. Egypt with its great advances in medicine, culture and architecture. The story is the same. On this journey I came across the issue of time. Is time really a linear thing or a loop? Why does it seem as if we are on a loop like the cycle of our planets and stars? Embarking on a sculpture like this raises allot of questions because of the meaning behind it, it raises allot of worries and fears. What does the future hold for my children, my grandchildren and their children? I went into this whole piece trying to send across a message and came out with too many questions. I came across too many theories, possibilities and ideals, from we have all knowledge in our DNA to we are just cosmic dust blowing in the wind mindless as cows, but are cows mindless. How much do we really know, according to our laws of physics a great deal, yet the most crucial things we can’t explain, most of this knowledge is not hard cold facts but THEORIES. So then I ask, are we meant to know any of this or are we mean to just trust and believe we are here for a reason. For every question I ask, in response I get a reply of 10 more with a 100 possibilities and it seems to be an infinite, insurmountable, confounding dilemma. A dilemma that can drag you from one place to the next with no end in sight, but the drive to wanting know, our curiosity that outweighs of a cats seems to compel us to plummet ever deeper into the abyss of the rabbit hole. Our own person black hole as an entire race. Some days I believe I have found the answer but in the deep recesses of my consciousness, I know this is a journey that will never end and go far beyond our existence. This may be where the afterlife comes in maybe we move on to another state of being, another plane of existence, may be that this is where we get our answers, or it could be oblivion, nothing and the old saying of where the tree falls it lies may be truly so. We hit the floor and are never to rise again just become fertilizer back to the earth from whence we came. This is where I begin to wonder if this planet is just one big playground for us and some of us kids are just the naughty ones making a mess and it all gets washed away at the end. So we can go on building our life size dolls, our Kens and Barbie’s because in the end none of it truly matters. For all we know none of this is real as it’s all meant to be in our minds anyway and if inside our head is a total black out and all this is supposedly a mental projection then who is to say what’s really going on. Like I said it’s all theory as always and a mess of ideas and stuff that doesn’t really matter. We are asking questions and the universe will never give up her secrets especially given our tendency to destruction so what’s the point in racking my brain to death. I have to perfect solution and that is to create, dream and just live, live, live, live.

Amariah Rac-maan