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Play, download and edit the free video Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

glazed ceramic and HD video, 2019
special thanks to Stacey Stanfill and her guidance with clay.

“Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” is a mixed media artwork combining projections of time-lapse animations and cast clay. Cast clay arms struggle to grasp the vine-y Cat’s Claw, a reviled invasive plant in North America, while the flowers and branches undulate, bloom and thrive.

The cast clay arms were the starting point for this piece, and were directly inspired by the Surrealist Jean Cocteau and his version of “Beauty and the Beast.” In Cocteau’s film, live human arms stick out of a castle’s dark hallway walls and hold candelabras, lighting a magical house. In “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” the arms struggle with Cat’s Claw, a cousin of jasmine, a pernicious fast-growing vine. It can cover an unattended house with unexpected speed, and will burst into yellow trumpets.

The artwork on the surface level depicts a human struggle with nature, but deeper, it is a struggle with the nature of humanity.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a person’s incorrect expectation, that affects the reality of a situation, leading to its eventual confirmation. I question how technological advances in media, such as the mass printing of the christian bible 500 years ago, and the invention of filmmaking 100 years ago, set the stage upon which human perception incorrectly predicts the future, and how actual events are influenced by these flawed predictions.

The example of the apocalypse in the christian bible, as an eventual end to human life, is a human mass destruction expectation or ideation. We see this fantasy continually played out in hollywood cinema in the form of superhero narratives. Children are indoctrinated into these legends at an early age (mine included). Does this “destruction ideation” spread into real life? Many events could be argued as an extension of this mass fascination. It can also be argued as the way that our cultural unconscious deals with the fear of the unknown, essentially the fear of death, which also can invert itself into the worship of death (Thanatos).

I try to engage with moving media in ways that provide alternatives to the apocalypse.

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