Twenty First Century Deity

Documentation of a self fulfilling prophecy

12-19-2024

Carved oak plywood sheet, four red candles, a vessel, notations, an empty bathroom, duct tape, camera, missing paint, absence, an iphone, digital manipulation, graphite

Stills from documentation

[Open/Cosed] Circuit

Project 3 09–24–1953

A journey into the reproductive relationship of the spiritual image and itself.

Between the months of October and December, I went on a mission to found a religion between myself and an inanimate object. The object was a wooden sheet I had carved down to an amorphous form, devoid of symbolic meaning or attachment with myself, almost apathetically un-devoted to myself. This was the base point of the work. From the day I carved the idol, I began worshipping it. Once a day, between specific time-slots in a single location I worshiped the idol in the intuitive manner I understood worship to be. As a part of the project, I recorded each ritual, and logged my thoughts after. Slowly, I developed physical and material algorithms that reinforced my experience as ritual, strengthening the foundation between myself and the idol I worshiped.

Forming a presence within the idol that could exist only for myself was the ultimate gesture I was performing for. Discreetly, the act of worship, of ritual, forged itself not from the literal act of myself worshipping, but the motions I enacted in order to perform devotion. It was
the sound of the dslr’s automatic focus feature whirring in the background, flicking the switch to turn the camera on, stripping off my clothes and noticing how similar the wood grain of the idol and my bare skin looked, taking the idol on and off of my tiled bathroom wall, scraping the candle wax that had dripped onto the bathtub in the process of worship. Each of these actions combined created one ritual, but alone existed as microcosms of the worship itself.

As time passed, and each day layered onto itself, the dynamic between myself and the idol became increasingly magnetic, each motion in correspondence to the imagery I had created to worship is where the divine developed. In its truest sense, the spectacle of the imagery itself is what made it possible to be divine, the imagery mimics the divine to represent it and therefore becomes its own, a performance that becomes the action it performs. The imagery I worshiped was a replica of a sacral object and in its experience, became sacred.

The works produced from this project are capsules of the meshing of performance and image. Each piece is a frozen replica of divinity, a morphing of ritual, image, object, and body that exist in a feedback loop to create a self realizing prophecy of sanctity. Twenty First Century Deity calls to the contemporary systems of divinity carved out of the image.

1) A series of notations that with each page added, 2) A scan of the vessel combined with one 3)A documented system of tracking
mirror and layer themselves untill reaching of the deitic replications, becoming its own the compiled time of worship using wax
satuaration. copy. drippings.

As ritual to the ordinary is a relationship of pattern and noise, presence and absence, it comes to know itself precisely through these phenomena. A crucial part to this project was the absence of the idol, which in contradiction to its material existence, drastically placed its presence in the wake of its physical absence. It manifests itself through replicas, which become vehicles that draw the orbit of sacrality themself.

One might wonder, why offer documentation of the worship as part of the work's final presentation if the focus of the project was to create something only the worshiper can experience? Isn't it sacrilegious? In a sense, the work is the documentation, it is not a sub genre to the end goal nor is it just a form of measurement. Every aspect of the ritual that contributes to the total image of the ritual is the ritual. Each representation or replication of the ritual becomes the sacred.