Braden Perryman
Senior Studio
All lives are lines: sometimes intersecting, sometimes running parallel for a span.
Cherish these fleeting convergences.
People ask what my art is about, but I lack both the foresight and hindsight to know myself the full implications of my actions. Perhaps my art is a coming-to-grips with this inescapable fact. The only way I have found to approach a description of my work is thus -
I emerge from the first quarter of my life and cannot help but think about lives in terms of stories: what kind of authors are we, what characters do we create, what worlds do they inhabit, and what plots are they tangled within? Yet this book that we are all engaged in writing is not about me, or you, or them, it’s about Us, it’s about the Greater Self that is the amalgamation of all of our selves, it is about love, it is about hate, it is about belonging and acceptance, it is about trust, betrayal, and forgiveness, it is about lovers becoming fathers and mothers, it is about children growing up; it is about seeking our own way, and in this journey finding grace; it is about inevitably falling from grace. It is about eroding the boundaries that divide us and rather emphasizing the qualities that bind us, it is about problematizing how capitalism categorizes and devalues people, it is about the ways in which we go about living our lives – our philosophies – it is about the compromises as much as the sacrifices; it is about the most mundane yet profound realization that Love and Mercy are everything.
It is personal; it is about my hopes, my desires, my addictions, my regrets, the things I wish I had or had not said, it is about my failures (too many to list), it is about those moments in life when language fails us, it is about wandering without being lost, it is about getting lost to be found. It is about the oblivion that awaits each and every one of us, it is about my friends who have died or are dying, it is about those they leave behind, it is about my own complicated relationship with death; it is about the awe and appreciation that comes only when we slow down, question, and consider why; it is about how Evil often takes the face of Good, it is about the God that is within us all, it is about nothing, it is about everything - it is about the ways in which we find meaning and recognize things as such, it is about the fallibility and malleability of perception.
It is about history, it is about rebellion, it is about realizing that the law does not correlate with justice, furthermore, it is about breaking the law: Thoreau says, under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison. It is about how though we like to think of ourselves as ‘individuals’ we are in reality particularized manifestations of broader social trends; it is about how each of us is always a singularity, a multiplicity, an inevitability, a trajectory, a martyr, a sinner, a saint - it is about how time is running out.
It is an ode to teaching and learning; it is an expression of sincere gratitude for having had these experiences. It is about the professors I have had; it is about my wonderful classmates who are all simultaneously seriously and lightheartedly engaged in the same task as I;
simply seeking to understand things.
