An anthropology professor of mine once noted, about the doodles in the margin of every paper I handed in, that I was forming patterns like those seen in the first stages of some induced hallucination.

I have to take his word for it about induced hallucinatory states, but it does often seem to me like life in entirety is really some manner of dream state- where perceptions and memories are stronger than the empirically measured fact.

My goal as an artist is to show things not necessarily as they are to a casual glimpse, but to drive deeper into the meaning, the feeling, of a moment. I want to share the trance-like dreams I sometimes have where suddenly everything just connects into a new pattern and everything gives a little lurch of epiphany, whether joyful, sorrowful, or fiercely angry. I want to to illustrate the stories that make up the world and the way the mind ticks away.

Everything I scribble is fairly personal to me, my words and my breath, and some of the pieces I most want to concentrate right now are closely linked to the bipolar and attached disorders that have marked how I deal with the world.

I hope to show the connections and disconnects, the vases and the face in between, and also to try and find a personal voice, and explain who, exactly, I am, to myself as much as to others. And I hope I can also somehow explain who others are as well, through the filter of shared experiences.

--AFz