NARCISSUS 2013 

Invited Distinguished Professors:

Eric Goldemberg, 

Niccolo Casas, 

 

Coordination: Gabriel Esquivel

 

Team: Chris Tackery, Ashley Feyes, Ryan Samadh, Jenny Zhou.

 

An appeal to the romantic epistemology of the object of fascinating beauty, amidst the guilts of decadence and innocence of youthful exuberance.

 

Narcissus evokes a dialectic between distinct morphological species of petals, pods, strands (together making the object) and a withering ground condition (field) acting as a foil to the estranged object, placed with conflicting representations of beauty, seduction and captivation. The aesthetic elements of these morphological species together compose a vernacular that explicitly references biomimicry, yet abstracts from a pure representation of nature in favor of poetic expression not inherent to a natural process. Formations of transparent membranes resembling petals are lined with striations that mutate into strands and breach the pod structures below, connecting these elements as an object, resting on a mound that has seemingly altered its process of decomposition to align its figure to the footprint of the pods in order to satisfy the orientation of the object. Texture first radiates vibrant colors to allure or captivate the subject towards an interpretation of the object as a figure of beauty and grace, capturing the introspection inherent in the hierarchical orientation of each element, while declining in coloration upon reaching the extremities, provoking the innate abjection towards death, but moreover abjectly presenting the chronological marriage of youth, beauty and decay, and the ground as a representation of the semi-personified reflection pool from the lore of Narcissus, consuming the object in a trap of lost time in order to intimately connect the exuberant qualities of the object with a representation of death and decay.

 

Qualities of decay and abjection are closely tied to a romantic ideal that nothing is permanent and sensation is fleeting. This suggests value is in the elusive and in the suggestion of fateful moments, thus defending abject sensibilities of possessing a level of beauty unattainable without reference to mortality. Decadence exists in the moment to be indulged upon, thus Narcissus is an object enveloped in introspection, the petals lively and ornate, wrapping pods that reveal excessive articulation behind the transparent petal skin and stranding. Akin to the lore of Narcissus, a man so in love with his own image he comes across a pool of water (which in readaptation of the story allures him as a siren would), and is unable to leave his reflection until his death, an object of desire is placed among notional representations of degeneration and in response has fixated itself upon its own ontological existence.