Nobody Claps Anymore

Artist Statement (updated 2017)

Human beings are meaning making machines.  Since our infancy, we ascribe meaning to everything we observe whether or not that explanation has basis in fact, or not.  Our childhood judgements as to way the world “is” sets the context of how we experience the world as adults.  It shapes how others, the environment, and we occur to ourselves.  It shapes our personalities, skills, and traits.  Furthermore, just like a fish doesn’t realize its context is water, we are unaware of the context in which we are experiencing the world.  It is this context that keeps us blind to the infinite number of possibilities that are present to each of us. 

I have struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember.  I was unaware that I was experiencing the world in the context of depression and anxiety until the mid-1990’s when I was in college.  Sitting alone, in my studio apartment, I struggled to find an explanation as to why I was feeling this way.  I would ascribe it to irrelevant things such a lack of popularity or difficulty getting a girlfriend.  My complaints about how life “is” and how people “are” were persistent.   My actions, attitudes, and perspectives about these complaints would remain fixed and unchanged despite having had numerable intimate conversations with a considerable number of people.  I would seek evidence to back up my perspective (no matter how much I detested it) and issue the same complaints anew.  At no point did I take responsibility for all of this and life continued on the same trajectory that it had been on.

I had previously held that the “chronic evolution of our lives… generate emotional cancers”.   As one goes from infant to toddler to adolescent we become present to aspects of our lives that we are not content with.  Often, instead of addressing those aspects, we defer and action in that area with the notion that we will have plenty of time to address it in the future.  As we grow older, those aspects continue to follow us, unaddressed.  What become minor irritations become the pink elephant in the room, the 500 pound gorilla that seems indominable.  What was once small is now an oppressive paralysing monster that stares you in the face every time you look at yourself in the mirror.

For years, I maintained this fixed way of being around the complaints in my life.  I was unhappy in my work, my marriage, my body, and myself.  I had complaints about all of those things and felt paralyzed to do anything about it.  The benefit of having a fixed way of being is that that I did not have to take any actions or responsibility for those complaints.  What I was not present to, is what it was costing me.   It was costing me everything… my whole life.

The series’ title, Nobody Claps Anymore, was inspired by an emotional reaction that I experienced when my plane landed in Melbourne. Hundreds of tons of metal, carrying hundreds of passengers, silently flared momentarily before the tires collided with the runway. The nose of the plane heaved forward. The reverse thrusters roared and rapidly decelerated the plane. As the plane turned off the runway onto the taxi-way the individual joints in the pavement were perceptible as the plane lumbered to the gate. Eventually the plane parked and I heard the sounds of belt buckles, zippers, and the rustling of bags. It all happened in silence. Not a word uttered. No applause. The audience had forgotten to clap.