24" x 18" Mixed media: encaustic wax, acrylic, paper, embossing labels, photographs and Polaroids on premiere wood panel, with maple floating frame.
This is the panel where the Directive stops being an experiment and becomes an institution, the moment it needed people and went to the one place where it knew they'd be halfway there already.
The field is blue and violet shot through with magenta, the color of a room lit by nothing natural. The nocturnal, ultraviolet register of the places these recruits were found. Alexa Martin and Henry Whitaker did their hunting at the most exclusive raves, in crowds already chemically loosened from their own edges. Eyes closed, heads tipped back, one mouth open in the middle of the composition in a rapture that is either the music or the chemistry or the fusion of both. The Directive did not have to teach these young people how to leave themselves, they were doing it voluntarily, on a dance floor, every weekend. The program only had to offer them somewhere the trip could go.
The captions make the conversion explicit and they are the panel's sharpest instrument. Punched out one character at a time in raised embossing tape, the vernacular of the tool drawer and the specimen drawer both. To emboss a word is to press it permanently into a surface; you cannot wipe it clean, because it isn't printed on the strip, it's deformed into it. And look at what the labels name. MIND. PSYCHOACTIVE. MEMORAGER. FOC. FIELD TRIP. These are not captions for the people but the components of the process, stamped down among the faces as though the recruits and the mechanism were the same inventory.
The work carries: Aspiration · Belonging · Transcendence · Discernment · Connection
