Meat Odyssey and picky (2023)
Oil on four A2 canvas panels
with cut cardboard and marble

(If one cannot or don’t have the time to play its game physically, they can reference this sheet which demonstrates the disorienting effect of engaging with the piece and its compulsion.)

When you peel open a window on picky, it shows what the next window is supposed to look like. I tried to capture the character of each of the 106 windows and treated them as tokens of abstractness; Some of them were distinct while others required me to copy in great detail. (I think using printed paper would ruin it because it's supposed to be a juxtaposition between the "classiness" of oil paintings and the casualness of a play board (part of picky was made with an advent calendar, in the hopes that it would inflict on the player both a sense of childish expectations and an anxiety of progression towards an unknown destination) while also the religious against the secular body.) The game is supposed to resemble the feeling of
"it's pointless but i cant stop!"

When someone was showing their CT scans as their self portraits in class, I thought it was interesting that when you try to capture the "idea/essence" of something,
you often end up making something abstract, but almost in a way of avoiding the physical form, emphasizing the division and pointing to somewhere indefinitely.
So I wanted to paint the abstract figure or meat, where the abstract extraction of meat is still meat (?) but perhaps disorganized, something made to only symbolize itself, and present an inescapable physicality though it may try to search for something more. Though for me the disorder is a struggle with guilt, anxiety, and compulsion, sometimes I feel like alluding my mental struggles to physical violence is almost naive; so I focused on the pure physicality of meat as I painted, only using the disorder as a medium. I wanted to avoid a representational and expressive language and pursue physical reactions by observing and collaging a collection of medical images, trying to construct a photographic objectivity like the CT scans. (but organically, to objectify a "subjective" state as an account) I mainly explored 'the abstract meat' in Meat Odyssey, maybe as a satire of a desensitized beautiful death, a sensationalized but senseless meat. While picky focuses on the "explosiveness" of meat, which is built on a basic fear of the sublime death (a death without narrative, or not necessarily death but becoming a pile of uncontrolled meat (whether vaguely resembling a human or not) at display) and unpredictability.

SIMILAR PROJECT >>

Two interactive paintings borrowing the experience of excoriation disorder, with themes of compulsion and abstract meat.

Map/answer sheet of the “calendar”: