Michael Aldana
nova aetate media
This body work concerns itself with my personal experiences having debilitating depression and anxiety, agoraphobia, and dysmorphia. Anxiety has led me to alter much how I live my life, and as such, how/what I create in my work. Primarily, what is pervasive in the work is the notion of repetition at an annoying and nauseating level. This may be in part because I’m abrasive in personality as well, but I’m literally trying to assault the viewer with too much to take in at once. I do try to dress it up as pretty. Just like myself at times, where I pretend I have it together and can be functional, but it’s all just a cacophony in reality. At times, the colors, forms, and patterns can be visually seductive and attractive, but it is the overall bombardment of various heavily saturated colors, overactive design, and forms that creates a visual vertigo (in me, and is my hopes the viewer as well). I try to leave little room for rest in the compositions to reflect how anxiety has affected my life.
There is, for me, in the artworks, always a battle between solace and anxiety. As subjects, I often use mandala like forms as a means of meditation, and centrality, or beauty. Overall, life is beautiful, and I’m always enamored with it, yet there is this constant battle with the shakes, nerves, doubts, discomforts that my brain has allowed to control how I manage my life. The figure, as a subject, allows me to portray a sort of effigy of the psychological self that is bombarded by these anxieties in its compositional environs, as well as a means to explore gender dysphoria. I feel this is an expression of a self that is no longer part of reality or within their own body with any sort of control. The use of obnoxious, garish, childlike color becomes a metaphor for the anxieties, and one that I use frequently in this regard. It is loud and tries to take over conversations, exchanges, and pilfers harmony and peace. The marks and colors surround and bombard the figures and forms as a means of representing the surreal nature one finds their self in when confronted with the aforementioned previously stated conditions.
nova aetate media
This body work concerns itself with my personal experiences having debilitating depression and anxiety, agoraphobia, and dysmorphia. Anxiety has led me to alter much how I live my life, and as such, how/what I create in my work. Primarily, what is pervasive in the work is the notion of repetition at an annoying and nauseating level. This may be in part because I’m abrasive in personality as well, but I’m literally trying to assault the viewer with too much to take in at once. I do try to dress it up as pretty. Just like myself at times, where I pretend I have it together and can be functional, but it’s all just a cacophony in reality. At times, the colors, forms, and patterns can be visually seductive and attractive, but it is the overall bombardment of various heavily saturated colors, overactive design, and forms that creates a visual vertigo (in me, and is my hopes the viewer as well). I try to leave little room for rest in the compositions to reflect how anxiety has affected my life.
There is, for me, in the artworks, always a battle between solace and anxiety. As subjects, I often use mandala like forms as a means of meditation, and centrality, or beauty. Overall, life is beautiful, and I’m always enamored with it, yet there is this constant battle with the shakes, nerves, doubts, discomforts that my brain has allowed to control how I manage my life. The figure, as a subject, allows me to portray a sort of effigy of the psychological self that is bombarded by these anxieties in its compositional environs, as well as a means to explore gender dysphoria. I feel this is an expression of a self that is no longer part of reality or within their own body with any sort of control. The use of obnoxious, garish, childlike color becomes a metaphor for the anxieties, and one that I use frequently in this regard. It is loud and tries to take over conversations, exchanges, and pilfers harmony and peace. The marks and colors surround and bombard the figures and forms as a means of representing the surreal nature one finds their self in when confronted with the aforementioned previously stated conditions.