Jonathan Creese
on Unfathomable Accumulation by Mieke Uhryniuk-Smith
Illustration by Jonathan Creese
An Inevitable Realisation
Time spent in the city has a way of making a sameness in everything, even things that bear no relation to each other. Slowly, I have found myself becoming indistinguishable from the pavement that I walk or the bus that I ride upon. It is like making art in a way, time being the artist, that is; the subtle influencing of materials, so that the sum of the parts is lost and nothing but sameness is perceived. When the city flourished, so did I: when it began to deteriorate, I became ill. The city has been ill for a long time now, a different ill than in years previous: one that seems to lie like a blanket cloud not able to be moved by any strong wind from the east. It makes the land bleak and the people bleaker, all life drained from their countenances till all, regardless of station, bear no resemblance to their former selves.
Years before, I had found the exhibition mounted in a recessed vitrine along the darkened hallway. A diffused sunrise was creeping through the windows, conversing with the warmer light shining from the glass and creating an unnatural dichotomy on the cold floor, like oil and water mixing perfectly. The space was quiet and so was my approach, the only evidence of my existence being the stepped traces of my boots, glistening like footsteps of Saccorhytus on the sands of creation. On the glass was adhered a label, declaring the name of the images displayed. All I saw in that name was blackness and nothingness and sameness, the expanse of the void of space, and the openness of the world when one looked east over the prairie. Behind the glass I saw the eight pieces of white paper hanging from the white wall, spot-lit by old tungsten bulbs which painted the whiteness as uniform, so that if not for the dimension of the sheets and the black of the ink they would go unnoticed. In the ink I saw the lines and the shapes of things I could not then comprehend, though I know now what they warned of. I often think, in my present dismal state, that it would have been better if the pages had not been segregated behind that glass, suspended on that white wall like an imitation of a Shipwreck Scene or any other great artists’ work. Maybe if I had been able to feel the fibres and to smell the oil of the ink, that tangibility would have allowed meaning to be realised sooner. Or maybe I should have stayed and stared longer, so that the lines would become words and the shapes become voices. Would I have been able to read the inevitable in those pages and be better prepared for our fate. Or would it only have brought me to my current state sooner.
These are the questions I ask, knowing that they are only a fool’s speculation on a reality that could never be again. Much later, I dreamt with my eyes open, laying in the eternal darkness that had become reality; I was standing on a ship, a seiner floating on a vast sea, far enough away from the land that the peaks of golden mountains, now becoming visible in the twilight of an early dawn, were mere waves on the eastern horizon of an otherwise tranquil sea. On the deck stood the captain staring down into the darkness of an open hold, some seven feet by seven feet. There was nothing to be seen through that darkness, and nothing to be seen if there had been any light. The darkness had a spirit, swirling like agitated water, the emptiness of it being filled with movements of the eye till it seemed to rock the entire boat and then the entire ocean. Fish moved in that darkness, swimming over and under each other until the water became the fish and the fish became the darkness which moved the boat and then the sea, its waters churning and bubbling as if a pot on a stove. In the waters boiling, the fish began to change, morphing and melting, becoming abstract forms without dimension, leaching their silver fluorescence until only black and white masses remained, objects far removed from their natural state. Then the water became again like a mirror, holding afloat the first rays of that new day’s light, which illuminated in its incandescence the spoils of our civilisation: an ocean of bottles and bags and cans and containers, stretching till the eye could see.
That horror has since held my very being in its captivity, bringing the understanding I desired, but at the cost of an imagination enslaved to images that separate me from the world, detached behind a lens like those pages in the darkened hallway. My revisiting of them in my waking hours and in those of rest only casts further despair, with the most prominent of images, the captain’s face, persisting like a thorn in my side. His was a face of joy as we beheld the new world stretched before us, as if what he saw was not the horrors I perceived, but rather paradise risen from the depths. He called for his sons to cast the seine, which collected but a portion of the filth, and I watched and pondered and feared, as the darkness was filled with a bountiful harvest.
Check out the archive and documentation for the show written about above:
About Jonathan:
I am a visual artist and writer. I write and make work about things that interest me, which right now seems to be the relationships between geographic space, perception, ritual tradition, and time.
Instagram: the.creole.factory
Website: www.thecreolefactory.org