Practicing decay is a series of post nostalgic paintings about human in nature.

We are used to looking at history as a linear movement of progress through time. That the world, and the life that inhabits it, are continuously evolving to a higher plane of existence.

Yet in reality, singular events that end in apparent destruction, may take an important part in reorganizing the sequence of evolution. From the extinction of the dinosaurs to the mutations of nature post-Chernobyl, we witness the phenomenon that destruction or calamity can be intertwined with renewal or genesis. The only constant we can truly identify is incessant change.

We live in a society that implies the opposite. We glorify static boundaries, attachment, ownership and compartmentalized control of space. We consider our acts to be isolated, individuated, and devoid of interconnectedness. Attempting to defy the fluid nature of reality, we anchor ourselves to landscapes, both physically and mentally, which are continuously sliding beneath, within, and around us. However, subconsciously, we can recognize that this stability we struggle for is an illusion. And that deep down, there is a strong impulse driving us toward the unpredictable and the chaotic. Toward a reinvention and renewal of the self.

Imagination allows us to mediate the uncertainty of change. Through imagination, we are able to step outside of time. We can live in a collage of multiple times and spaces. With our feet both planted in the now and our thoughts hovering in various futures and pasts.

That’s the space where we may envision what could have been. We can test the attainable and the unattainable. We may mourn not being born as someone else, somewhere else. We may be nostalgic for an event that never took place and long for an imagined era of which we have no recollection. We may dream of an unfamiliar future and yearn for a different human nature or a different human, in nature.

Nature doesn’t make the distinction between good and bad; destruction and creation are just different expressions of change. Doesn’t our subconscious similarly operate in this way, in a landscape devoid of valence judgments? Could alternative possibilities ever emerge without this freedom from discrimination? Perhaps life itself is no more than a practice in the nature of

what if…