Matthew Adam Ross

School Art, MFA 1

Gestalt of Personhoods

What constitutes our subjectivity? Is it futile to have a complete awareness of its ongoing becoming? Can we demarcate and cartograph to what extent forces norms and ethics infiltrate our conscience? Does the self portrait reflect the “I” of the beholder, or is the “I” a product of a fecund production system, a continuum of identity manufacturing visible invisibles. Its product: a willing participant? Is its foundation a gridded and rigid root network, an identity forming assemblage of roommates and copilots guiding us back to the doctrine of progress and perfection? One that we defend polemically? And how does this affect our self-fashioning? Do we fashion on within the grid? Do we destroy it? Do we reconstitute it? Do we shamelessly disguise it? Does our repeated exposure to the grid render our supposed free willingness scalable, and do we have to reject or delegitimize the foundations of our subjectivity to inoculate against what we have unwillingly become? Is this even what we consciously desire? Is “We” an ignorant totality? Maybe we can modify the grid to be stupid (not unintelligent!), is that unrecognizable? Is that maneuver-less? Can we be fools? Can we just know nothing, ever?