Perspective has become a bloated word, laced with an optimism on the thought that should we see things from every angle, that the ensuing knowledge gained will solve all problems. However the assaults from a fear of an unknown or a fundamental realization that the world you lived in being “wrong” would contain most to an echo chamber of safety. We seldom get chances to participate in these perspective shifts, and why, knowing the outcome would only be a coin toss? However vast our knowledge and understanding, our sights are narrow, and the want to involve “the others” instead of just ourselves drains motivation dry. Artists Khotan Fernandez and Seth Ellison omit this timidness in favor of what lies beyond the fence. A flavor not of envy, yet of a tonal shift past what defines a singular person, in favor of looking into the nuance of each individual identity. Through Khotan's third eye, he reexamines the self in fragility often discarded by the masculine through the form of sculptured assemblages and alien landscapes. And Seth Ellison envisions the other through a geometric and cartoonish-abstract reimagining of the rural American south. On The Other Side is a discussion between two artists on accepting and empathizing with more than the self, and that the whole of a singular person becomes greater by peering through the eyes of another.
The acts and work of artist Khotan Fernandez range across mediums, dialogues, styles and intensity. Simultaneously lighthearted and deadpan serious, Khotan’s work is always an exploration of an unknown, often of the artist's own psyche and machinations. This journey continues into his most recent set of work, particularly the sculptures approaching the titular concepts of the Femme Fragile. The assemblages formed are ones on a verge, dangling in their own fragility to break through the combination of delicate ceramics and hardened iron rail screws, but remove the uncertainty through structure. Rough grain wood and strong geometric form play against the motifs of breakable ideas, and give a strength and empowerment to acceptance. Where once a brittle self, afraid of the frail in fear of breaking it, there remains an effort to rebuild the broken into something new.
Upon the walls the works of Seth Ellison compliment the introspection through the eyes of emotion against the lived experience of reality. The work of an artist formed by the experience of a side of American culture often lowered beneath others, a rural south seen as a danger to even enter in modern times. The stigma brought to highlight is the first hurdle to overcome in conversation about an “other” we don’t begin to want to understand. Through Seth’s pieces, comedy and allegory play the same fiddle, in deep saturation with pieces such as The Encounter, a visage of cornfields and people from all walks of life and post-life. The reduction of form and figure, of the faced and faceless characters, and the ambiguity of scene all play a part in the realized memories that the artist confronts from a people not misunderstood, but not discussed in the annals of history.
Understanding an individual in theory should take as long as our own lives, as they live their entirely separate and unique set of experiences in parallel to ours. The conclusion to come to then would be if that secondary experience would even allow us to understand in the end. Would we have made the same choices, come to the same conclusions, had the same ideas? The result will and should always be no, as living as copies of one another is hardly a worthwhile life, but we can express the appreciation that we understand the process, the journey that one took to achieve where they are at. Battling against the mindset of sympathy and empathy,just ushering a joined realization that each of us lives is worth living.
