Sugarlift Masterwork Series: Adam Lupton's Telos (The Drowning)

SERIES

The work looks at ritual, spirituality, myth, and cult with an analogous gaze, questioning our attachment to and desire for certainty in religion and historical narrative. Viewed through a sociological lens, the ingenuity and genius of religion is evident: how we created meaning and answers to questions we weren’t capable of comprehending, inventing complex stories and institutions to make sense of the unknown. Alternatively, our different myths, legends, and stories bent our minds and morals to fit doctrines, and used those guises to justify wars, slavery, social and economic hierarchy, etc., while disassociating ourselves from growing facts and evidence. This work grapples with those shortcomings of being human through ceremony and ritual – how we cope (and have coped as a species) to understand that we're small conscious beings in the face of a vast indifferent universe. 

Co-opting multiple aesthetics and materials helps me to explore the multifaceted nature of religion’s historical and sociological underpinnings: stripping forms of worship of their acculturated and specific importance to show the uniformity of our reverence throughout history. Constructing images to use fabrics, building materials, sand, and dirt – and also the removal of paint into and around the canvas – extends the work past its boundaries and activates the divide between physicality and representation, figure and abstract, and the ‘real’ and the ‘spiritual’. In invoking the scale, materiality, and medium of the work, the installations help break the surface and rectilinear structure of the paintings to fracture space, implicating both the eye and the body of the viewer. Akin to members of past and present religious ceremonies, the viewer will corporeally feel the push and pull of the aesthetic-religious experience through the artwork.