Abstractions in Perceptual Reality:

It feels as if I've been preparing for life my entire life. Like I’m some other person saying strange things, as if I leave the moment where I am, and then come back to it, having experienced it before. But, I know it's just me dealing with a decade of indoctrination. From the day I was born, I was surrounded by narcissistic right wing religious fundamentalist propaganda. This was my world. So, I tried to rationalize. No one comes out unscathed. It's a reality that's meant to be mocked, but there was almost no counter narrative where I grew up. It was the decade, from about the age of twelve to twenty-two when I was practically fully indoctrinated. Although I never stopped questioning, I was in deep.

There was war in the news when I was twenty-three. That's when I realized I’m not conservative. Moving to the city saved me, but it should've been sooner. This might barely be seen in my work, but it's there among the layers. Layers of abstraction, notions of connection, growth, and decay, can be seen as erasure like hints of my failed attempts to escape sooner. Although, connection and disconnection seem to mirror each other at times in my mind at times in my work, I feel love and hope in humanities ability to be resilient, and despair in our desire for destruction.

I begin with fragments of my writings, thoughts, and diagrams mixed with ads, memories, and propaganda, to make thought collages (legible and illegible), and proceed from there. I consider likely limitations of perception, and dream to go beyond them. I'm also interested in how we see patterns between the political, personal, and speculative (what some might call spiritual), to create a viewpoint (or a feeling that we can understand reality), which is ultimately unattainable. I'm driven by an impossible goal, by the inherent desire of perceiving universal truth/worldview. I know it's ridiculous. I know I'll never get there, but I can't stop my mind from trying. I just want to get closer. Drawing from my writing, misconceptions, revelations, and speculations, I record struggles of an ever evolving thought process. My work is an expression of this journey.

Kurt Riebel