Autophagy: Flase Gods

We have spent three centuries handing ourselves over.

Each dominant technology of the modern era has absorbed a capacity humans once held as their own. The Industrial Revolution took the body's labor and called it liberation. The Information Revolution took memory, recall, and orientation, and called it convenience. The cognitive revolution is taking the thinking itself, and we are calling it intelligence. Each surrender has been justified as progress. Each one has narrowed what humans understood themselves to be for.

Autophagy: False Gods is a body of fifteen paintings that sits inside this longer pattern. Autophagy names a biological process — the cellular machinery by which an organism consumes its own components, sometimes for renewal, sometimes for survival, sometimes as the prelude to its own collapse. The series asks which of these we are inside, and what we have already begun to worship in the place of what we lost.

Each painting renders a figure caught between forms. The body is built in the language of classical sculpture, the form Western culture has used for two millennia to declare what it values most about being human. The head — where thought once lived — has been replaced by an apparatus of the present moment. A halo presses behind each figure, citing a particular work from the long Western tradition of paintings depicting reverence and devotion. The figures themselves draw structurally on archetypes we have inherited and never quite outgrown — the watcher, the strategist, the beloved, the mourner, the sovereign, the maker, the messenger, the healer, the victor, the keeper of the hearth, the one who moves between living and dead. These are the false gods of the title: not the technologies themselves, but what we have agreed to surrender in exchange for them.

The paintings are constructed in acrylic through accumulated crosshatching, a technique inherited from drawing rather than painting. Hatching is the most explicitly handmade mark in any visual medium — proof of human time, repeated decision, the wrist's particular tremor. Across surfaces that depict the dissolution of the human form, every line is a small refusal of the thing the work is about. Where the figures fragment, the hatching grows denser; where the body holds, it softens; where the apparatus emerges, it tightens. The technique enacts the thesis it cannot resolve.

The body of each figure is rendered in true grayscale, drained of the chromatic life the eye associates with presence. Color is held in only two places: the gold of the halo, and the cool light of the apparatus. The human form has lost its color along with its labor, its memory, and now its mind. The only living color in each painting is what we have surrendered ourselves to.

Around the edge of each canvas, in a position not visible from the front, the painting's identity is recorded in binary.

I am not interested in critiquing the apparatus, and I am not interested in mourning what came before it. Both positions offer the viewer a posture they can adopt and then leave behind. I am interested in constructing a situation in which the viewer cannot avoid noticing their own posture — toward this technology, toward what they have already surrendered, toward what they are still calling theirs. The figures in Autophagy: False Gods are not cautionary. They are mirrors, and the question they hold is not mine to answer.

— KENZIE