BOLT UPRIGHT
2019
Prismacolor pencil on paper. 2.5 x 3.5 m.
Testing language to its limits, Bolt Upright describes ten seconds of existential terror through a series of tangential, fragmentary sentences where words sag under their own weight. Using Blanchot’s framework of the disaster as unknowable and inarticulate, the work is an exercise in failure to grasp or articulate fear of death.
The work describes a moment of waking in the night, full of inarticulate horror around mortality, and extrapolates relationships between chaotic content to create a storm of fear on a vast scale.
Drawing on W.J.T. Mitchell and Roland Barthes’ writings around description as a way of disrupting narrative and sense-making, Bolt Upright creates a wall of content that draws the reader forward and backward, moving between the granular detail of words at close range, to a shifting abstraction at a distance.