Cicada molting is a process that is fascinating to me.
The molting signifies that the larvae are becoming strong. Inspired by this process, my work sheds the consumer armature of everyday objects in my apartment. The process feels like a cleansing. The embellishments of corporate design are stripped away, and my relationship to objects in space is made more ethereal. Everything can breathe again. The skeletal mesh outlines delineate things but their materiality is sacrificed for the sake of a more open and meditative perception of the environment. The process is also healing and therapeutic, an antidote to the traumatic aftermath of a severe car accident in which, although nobody was seriously injured, we were shaken by the disruption of our complacent assumptions about our mortality. My accompanying Buster-Keaton-influenced video of routines performed with the mesh forms adds a twist of absurdity to the ghostliness of voided forms.
(Xiyun Xu, 2021)
Struggling leaf
Vision Plants: Transpersonal Challenge
Label: Sounds True Recordings
Format: Audio Cassette
Country: USA
Year: 1990
Vision Plants: Transpersonal Challenge
Label: Sounds True Recordings
Format: Audio Cassette
Country: USA
Year: 1990
Terence Kemp McKenna was an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture".
