Michael Cuadrado

A rumination on the pleasures and aversions of knowing and being known, my work considers questions of desire. As Lin Hejinian delineates in The Language of Inquiry as "a conflict between a desire to satisfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world," I take on concerns of form and abstraction as a question of relation and (mis)understanding—the process of attempting to relate to and understand oneself or others. By constructing the spatial via intuition, improvisation, and abstraction, I hope to occupy the often unpredictable realities of relationality. I often wonder: What could occur if we give up our illusions of understanding and control and give in to our ineffable feelings and desires? What stakes does abstraction hold concerning identity and representation? By succumbing to the unknown, or in this case, working through form improvisationally, I wonder if we can begin to think in ways that reorder our supposed ontological determinations, or perhaps as Nahum Dimitri Chandler puts it, to think with paraontology. If so, maybe conceptions such as love don't always have to feel like the universe erupting but like a star fading away, a faint impression.. I hope this exhibition sustains a similar sensation to what Lauren Berlant conjures in her question: "Why is love, the encounter with relationality, not always traumatic, while always overwhelming?" A sensation that embraces the sensual pleasures of a subject's unbearable, yet unattainable, access—the gaps between our intentions and the things that don't always work out.