With My Face Against the Future

Josh Whipkey, Artist Statement, January 2020

With My Face Against the Future

The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future. - Emmanuel Levinas

Find my sun in the dark side of my shadow - Aaron Bruno/AWOLNATION

I fell in a frozen lake.  For a few moments I wasn’t sure I would be able to get out.  I was about twenty yards from the shoreline, and assumed, as I went in head first, that the water would be too deep.

Driven by panic, and perhaps the initial reason for being there in the first place which was to rescue my dog who’d fallen in a few moments before, I thrust my legs straight down toward the bottom.  My boots touched with my face just above the surface.  I threw the dog up onto the ice, and pulled myself out hoping the shelf wouldn’t crack again.

Almost twenty years later I’m haunted by something that happened in the few moments my dog and I spent in that lake; something I’ve been feverishly trying to get at with my paintings; the moment.

A moment spent in a frozen lake is a moment spent in eternity; a duration without time that hovers somewhere between life and death - a liminal zone where reality shatters and language fails… the persistent presence of a substantive darkness… a nightime that invades in the middle of the day.

Stitches died a few years ago.  She got old, and sick, and moved on.  Our shared secret became mine alone the moment Nikki and I watched life retreat from her eyes.  Another eternity.  Another secret kept between partners and friends.  Another mysterious spark in the dark night time that swallows days.

The paintings lead me through it, but in the way the beam of light from a flashlight might lead you through a dark forest. The path that's taken is created at the same time it is revealed by the beam of light - a dialectical process. Aufhebung = sublation = the creation, within the act of creation, of possibility... a smear of paint does not exist until it is smeared on, and once in existence it determines the speed, intensity, and direction of the next smear, and so on, just as the beam of the flashlight pushes against the darkness enough to see the next step to be taken as it is taken; where to place the foot as one leg swings forward, and the other pushes off...