Manifestion Or Infestation?
A Guess At Where An Idea So Bizarre Began.
"Gargantuan Media". It's a title that I've done business under and published books with but what is a Gargantuan?
Strictly speaking: gargantuan is an old English term for an extremely large thing. A castle, a continent, an asteroid. Something so large that it instantly miniaturizes everything around it by comparison.
As a self-publishing artist in a rural part of the USA "gargantuan" is how I've seen the rest of the country - as a large and foreboding collection of strange people and huge buildings. Each group appeared to me to take so little notice of my passing that I began to feel that old Kafka-esque feeling creeping up.
Like, I was in actuality just a tiny bug busily racing to stay slightly ahead of giant footsteps.
It appeared that I wasn't alone in this. The rest of people, as alien as they seemed to me, were also scampering around. All of us were collectively trying to stay ahead of a deadly pair of Chuck Taylors before they landed on top of one or more of us - squashing us flatter than day old roadkill on a busy county highway.
From this bug's eye view, I've seen a sea of multi-colored lights over Chicago from the back of a darkened Greyhound bus at 3:30AM. I've taken the elevator to the 29th floor and looked across the Cincinnati skyline. I've walked under endless rows of fluorescent lights through the neatly carpeted halls and labyrinths of huge corporations at lunch hour. I've shuffled meekly through the sub-zero downtown streets of Minneapolis in the cold heart of winter. I've gazed at a brilliant orange sunset across the San Francisco Bay and down at the dark black stones of the Rocky Mountains at noon.
All of these places definitely dwarfed me. They stared back with cold, inhuman indifference, unable to acknowledge me in any visible way. They would be here long after I crawled away from them - keeping impossibly still and silent (at least in my memory) for the next soul to observe and ponder.
These dramatic size and scale differences were inescapable. They eventually took shape in my work. This series of one of those shapes.
A Guess At Where An Idea So Bizarre Began.
"Gargantuan Media". It's a title that I've done business under and published books with but what is a Gargantuan?
Strictly speaking: gargantuan is an old English term for an extremely large thing. A castle, a continent, an asteroid. Something so large that it instantly miniaturizes everything around it by comparison.
As a self-publishing artist in a rural part of the USA "gargantuan" is how I've seen the rest of the country - as a large and foreboding collection of strange people and huge buildings. Each group appeared to me to take so little notice of my passing that I began to feel that old Kafka-esque feeling creeping up.
Like, I was in actuality just a tiny bug busily racing to stay slightly ahead of giant footsteps.
It appeared that I wasn't alone in this. The rest of people, as alien as they seemed to me, were also scampering around. All of us were collectively trying to stay ahead of a deadly pair of Chuck Taylors before they landed on top of one or more of us - squashing us flatter than day old roadkill on a busy county highway.
From this bug's eye view, I've seen a sea of multi-colored lights over Chicago from the back of a darkened Greyhound bus at 3:30AM. I've taken the elevator to the 29th floor and looked across the Cincinnati skyline. I've walked under endless rows of fluorescent lights through the neatly carpeted halls and labyrinths of huge corporations at lunch hour. I've shuffled meekly through the sub-zero downtown streets of Minneapolis in the cold heart of winter. I've gazed at a brilliant orange sunset across the San Francisco Bay and down at the dark black stones of the Rocky Mountains at noon.
All of these places definitely dwarfed me. They stared back with cold, inhuman indifference, unable to acknowledge me in any visible way. They would be here long after I crawled away from them - keeping impossibly still and silent (at least in my memory) for the next soul to observe and ponder.
These dramatic size and scale differences were inescapable. They eventually took shape in my work. This series of one of those shapes.
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"Cogito ergo sum irascor." — René Deroaches