DIGGING THROUGH OLD FILES – ARTIST STATEMENT FROM 2009

Jesse Hlebo

4.23.09

There are consistent, reoccurring themes in my life involving obsession and necessity. Since I can remember I’ve always felt that these two things are integral to the decisions I make on a daily basis, and without them I know for certain I wouldn’t require nearly as much productivity.

The things that slapped me into recognition of my need to create aren’t completely conscious; the ones that are follow a list marked with pain and scarred with a deafening sense of my own mortality: the edge of suicide, mental incapacitation due to stress overload, the start (and continuance of) an intense questioning of everything I ever believed to be ‘true’ and everything I believed to have ‘value’, and the rejection of life altering ideologies and faiths. These situations have, among other things, taught me that I have no other choice but to rely on myself for anything I need. This pressure that I’ve bestowed upon myself requires my constant attention to process, something I feel I never escape and never distinguish, whether cleaning a toilet, writing a poem, or walking until my feet bleed.

The manner in which I work becomes supplementary to the environment in which I’m working in, through an overcrowding of time the work spawns less of a meditated creation and more of reactionary one. The pieces final form becomes representative of this space that is typically informed by such sources as weather, roommates, anger, hunger, sleep deprivation and loneliness.

Residing amongst all these things is fear. Fear I won’t do what I want to do, fear I won’t accomplish what I’m capable of, but most of all fear that at any moment I will die and all that will be left is what I’ve already accomplished. At this point in my life I have not reached a finishing point, though I feel one coming quickly, and this ‘point’, this thing I don’t know, yet think about so much, is the reason I wake up. If I stop then I stop.

 

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