{Port-Al} / Harbor-Faith
2018-2023
Is a sculptural composition that uses found and artist-made objects. These assemblages revolve around thoughts about one’s origin and destination. The artist makes use of the automobile as a metaphor for the human body where the Self seems to be conjured, referencing spiritual technologies to question its extent.
Finding self/home in a body, a city, a country, a lover or a relative. Imagery from the automotive industry is used to evoke religious interpretations of the illusory separation of objects and events; questioning the assumptions of what is one’s own or of another. What is natural or unnatural, what is foreign and native, good or undesirable.
The use of the grid from ‘Snakes and ladders’, a Hindu game that was devised to teach the non-existence of human will, and the Judeo-Christian motives that suggest otherwise bring forth the paradoxical nature of our perception presented as a Map. The work is made in response to the maker’s seeming personal experience, being born on a ‘pirate’ nation, living on a timeline that feels more cyclical and spiraled than linear.
The need to be identifiable to feel at home might be a universal human experience. But most likely we do not come from anywhere and we aren’t going somewhere either. The present moment is the only home there is, the only experience to be had, and that has no identity.
Each work within the work is a fractal of a story.
Follow the narratives here:
https://adrianabela.substack.com/