Semen drips from the walls of the birth chamber. Out of the egg the person is pulled into life, into a semiology. Stars, mandibles, the psychic cross—a variety of symbols emerge on the formless body and guide it through the pain of rising, the pain of the mother, of the child, of waking up in the morning and going to bed in the evening—birthing, dying, birthing, dying day by day, turn turn turn about. The birth of an object is the death of its material components. Yet while the capitalist object, the product, is destined for waste, the necropolis of the landfill or the fiery annihilation of the recycling plant, the art object evades this fate by remaining as it is. It enters into the symbolic, as the thing wishing to become sign, as the thing made up of signs which is itself a sign. But a sign of what? And a sign from where? I carry the form of the formless within me. The birth and the death. The sentinel at the gate. The light flickering on then off in the empty garden. At this juncture there are only questions and visions. Consciousness is that which begins. Must it end? Or did the beginning only have the appearance of finality, of a nothingness in which life spawns as a closed curve? Birth and death are the limit of the knowable. Does the order that I frame them in matter? Birth then death. Death then birth. Birth and death, death and birth. In “My Mother, Esoterica” we see a series of objects gathered from the liminal. A meth pipe discarded reemerges in the ooze of the pod. A face down polaroid lies beneath the head of a dead dog captured in a polaroid. In an infinite regress, there is no beginning, no end, only a point where the observer arrives. In a psychedelic experience, we arrive somewhere, in another intuition of space and time. Was this somewhere always there? Was it waiting for us to arrive, for us to return? In a society where ritual is widely absent, this work highlights the plane of immanence on which ritual nonetheless manifests as a rupture that threatens to undermine the day to day banality of capitalism. “My Mother, Esoterica” gives us the opportunity to contemplate this break in the wall. It reminds us that beneath the structures imposed upon our life, a window opens, and the structure is laid bare.

—Brandon Bien