Symptoms of a Dissonant State

Sammanfattning

In the essay Symptoms of a Dissonant State I go through the main elements that have shaped my artistic practice of painting, from my journey of collecting, as a way of physicalizing otherwise intangible experiences, to searching for community and finding furries. With both personal and theoretical input I attempt to uncover components within myself, and in turn my artistic practice, that inform the dissonant state I feel and ultimately long to portray through my paintings. Throughout the text I converse with the thoughts of Naomi Klein in her book Doppelganger as well as Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of Chrononormativity as presented in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Moreover, I draw on personal experiences of puzzlement throughout my life that inform my playful yet hyper-vigilant approach to painting. I present and elaborate on the two categories of paintings I tend to do: ‘dynamic stills’ and ‘puzzles’ and I conclude with delving into the world of furries. In my ode to furries, I finally find a home - a shell which is habitable in all its uncanniness and which has become a muse-like object in my figurative universe. I conclude with a kind of insistence on the importance of the dissonant state and I dub painting a kind of ‘second life’ which can facilitate a vital manifestation of that which usually has no form or place in the physical world.