Hepaglyphic Symbol of Convergence

Performance to painting

This is a performance character that I had inhabited from about 2009 to 2012.  The character is somewhat of a medium, translating the ambiance of the space through bodily motion for the happenstance viewer to encounter, a bit like a solitary Happening if you will.  I personally view the movements as a jazz collaboration between myself and the location in which I am performing.  My heartbeat is the constant rhythm and the sounds of my environment are responded to by my specific subset of movements that are inherent to my form.  The title of the character in these performances came to me in a dream.  A light-being came to me and told me, “You are the Hepaglyphic Symbol of Convergence” and I woke up and immediately wrote down the term. 

Hepa – a filter.  Like in HEPA filter which delineates the functioning of the filter into 3 parts: interception, impaction, diffusion. 

  - hepa, as in hepatic like in the liver and liver functioning, so essentially a filter again. 

Glyphic – “glyph” is an element of writing. More precisely, a glyph is an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written, according to Wikipedia.  So then, glyphic, beyond being a rock band, is an adjective, therefore belonging to the mark. 

Symbol – according to the meriam-webster dictionary is 

1: an authoritative summary of faith or doctrine  

2: something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance; especially : a visible sign of something invisible <the lion is a symbol of courage>  

3: an arbitrary or conventional sign used in writing or printing relating to a particular field to represent operations, quantities, elements, relations, or qualities  

4: an object or act representing something in the unconscious mind that has been repressed <phallic symbols>  

5: an act, sound, or object having cultural significance and the capacity to excite or objectify a response  

Convergence – according to dictionary.com  

–noun  

1. an act or instance of converging.  

2. a convergent state or quality.  

3. the degree or point at which lines, objects, etc., converge.  

And then converge means - 1. to tend to meet in a point or line; incline toward each other, as lines that are not parallel.  

When you put it all together, it comes out to this: I am the cosmic filter that brings together many streams of input and creates meaning out of it all to make visible what is usually invisible. That feels pretty spot on. And that’s literally what I was aiming to do with these performances. But hilariously, it’s also a really great description of my art in general.

Over the years I ended up making three costumes, a white one, which was the original, a black one and a red one. They all were almost exactly the same patterns except for their color. White, black, and red of course are the three main colors of the alchemical Great Work, the Albedo, the Negredo and the Rubedo. I kept a rigorous schedule of the performances and did one every month for the duration of the time I was invested in this work and I have a host of gorgeous photographs of each of them. I performed my first one at Baker Beach, which are the photographs in this post. I did performances in so many other locations around the Bay Area, from Golden Gate Park, Albany Bulb to under the Willy Mays statue by Oracle Stadium.

This project was part of my first year of work in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute (my experience there deserves its own post and will be subtitled: the story of how I stopped painting). I was creating a Great Work of my own, though it was utterly unappreciated in a lot of ways and worst of all, I didn’t appreciate it either because of it. The performances inspired the following three paintings which together I call Mundus Est Fabula: The World is a Story. They wove together into a meditative installation piece, literally. Each painting is framed in crochet and then I crocheted a sort of web that you sat in the center of cross-legged to contemplate the work. You can see that the photos I included above are the reference photos for the paintings below. The largest of the three, clocking in at 7 feet x 9 feet across is the purple one below and got an introductory post a few months ago which you can read HERE

This one, titled So That’s Where Crystals and Bubbles Come From explains that the Visionary art trope of crystals and bubbles is actually bird person vomit (hehe).

Mundus Est Fabula: The World is a Story is a behemoth of a painting and I like to joke that it’s also a snapshot of the inside of my mind. There’s all kinds of stuff hidden in there from Nazca lines to the marks that yellow-bellied sap suckers (a kind of bird) leaves on the barks of trees as they feed. The bird people are the inhabitants of my brain. The door to the sky is the door to the “real world” outside.

Red is the Color of My Desire has a crop circle pattern hidden behind the figure among other things and is about the magic of manifestation.

There’s a lot more to say about all of this and I’ll follow up with another deeper dive down the line. I hope you’ve enjoyed this! Thank you for reading.

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