Jay Heikes – No future ism

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Where do I go when I sleep? It’s a silly question but I keep asking it. I know I enter a repetitive space of meditation through breathing and calm; a hibernating space that leads to a sense of delusional magic, something like a private cave where the language we’ve built up as a society has no weight. Maybe this is a studio. Maybe this is a bed. In here, time is not only abstract but also violent and deep. I realize that approaching a body of work through the unconscious is like telling people your dreams in the morning. No one wants to hear these dreams and they are as uninteresting as they sound the moment they slip from lips. However, if we turn night to day and start from the end, working backwards to discover belief or faith or any sort of system that defies logic, then we have to start with the zyzzyva. It is a weevil or a beetle or something that looks like its name: a cartoon depiction of the male genitalia in bug form. But if we start with this ridiculous insect and work our way through the unconscious and really look at magic for what it is, then we know that charisma and materials are all there is. To start a journey you have to walk down a dead end street and then change your reality through a suspension of disbelief. While walking, if you hear yourself compromising too much you’ll awake in the gutter. If you walk the walk, then somehow you’ve cheated death, and death, which is a form of branding too slick for us to recognize, will swallow us all. Our resistance is being ourselves, not our clever selves. No future ism is not a call to arms. And it is not a form of immolation. It is more like the variable in an experiment. I know the constant. I know taxes. I know practice. But what is the variable? That’s left for me to decide and I have to find the profound variable. In this case, the variable is a set of Zs that are in between days. What they document is the potential of the next thought, knowing that final representation buries itself, never to be fully redeemed.

Is it possible to have an art of pure motion as the futurists predicted; a post- contemporary state of construction? Are we living in a world of perpetual re-alignments that only cause a distracted fracturing, resulting in faux tribalism? Again, more silly questions, but if I can convince you that, as a viewer, you will slowly fall asleep by the end of this text and only the clicking of my tongue sucking away from the roof of my mouth will serve as a cue for your next thought, would you be hypnotized? I hope not. But strangely, If you told me you had been hypnotized and lost minutes of your life in time, never to be regained, I would take that as a sign you had entered a space I had never been able to gain access to. With all these attempts knocking on the door, I’m still the one saying, ‘Who’s there?’ awaiting a clever resolution. But there are cracks in the door and instead of opening it, look in those cracks, you will see the sky.

Jay Heikes