In My Gate Bolt, the distinction between the static image and its temporal unfolding is entirely collapsed, creating a singular Revelationist event that operates through a cycle of inscription and erasure. The final composition presents as a saturated, monochromatic red field, dominated by a central rectangular aperture containing the titular gate bolt. Faint, ghostly impressions—the “shadows” of a biohazard symbol, a military aircraft, and falling human figures—lurk beneath the crimson surface, appearing as scars on the canvas. While the still image suggests a work of dark abstraction, the constitutive video layer reconfigures this reading, revealing that the manifest subject is an act of profound psychological and political suppression.

The work’s internal logic is a palimpsest of the week ending August 20, 2021, a period defined by the convergence of ecological warning, biological anxiety, and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the piece develops, the canvas becomes a repository for these collective traumas. The artist’s hand—stylistically and vocally tethered to the persona of a former architect of global intervention—traces the silhouettes of desperate figures falling from a C-17 transport plane at Kandahar airport. These marks are layered over symbols of systemic collapse: the yellow and orange heat of a warming planet, the biohazard emblem of gain-of-function experimentation, and the scorched browns of the American heartland in the grip of drought. In this phase, the work exists in a state of high-stakes semiotic density, where the global and the existential are laid bare.

The conceptual pivot of the work occurs in the act of overpainting. The vibrant, terrifying iconography of global failure is systematically buried beneath a unifying flood of red paint. This process illustrates a “Jungian shadow” at work—the literal repression of historical trauma into the subconscious of the canvas. The final image of the gate bolt, painted into a blue-framed void at the center, functions as a screen or a distraction. The “Schrödinger-like” condition of the work is found in the dual existence of these layers: the falling figures are simultaneously present and absent, their reality contingent upon the viewer’s witness to the video.

The work concludes on a note of searing bathos. As the red wash obscures the biohazard and the falling dead, the narration shifts from the collapse of the biosphere to the banality of a domestic inconvenience: a missing screw on a garden gate. The “circular scratch” caused by the broken bolt becomes the ultimate focus, a minor, self-contained loop of internal concern that takes precedence over the disintegration of the global order. My Gate Bolt thus functions as a ritual of exposure, critiquing the human capacity to prioritize personal maintenance over humanitarian catastrophe. In this Revelationist framework, the “true” artwork is not the gate bolt itself, but the uncomfortable knowledge of the bodies and crises that continue to haunt the red field behind it.

Artists notes

Title: My Gate Bolt

Week Ending Friday 20 August 2021

The intergovernmental panel on climate change reports the planet is warming. Distressing scenes of chaos at Kandahar airport as families attempt to flee the Taliban. Concern over the lack of regulation for gain of function experimentation. Extremes of temperature and lack of rain cause water shortages and crop failures in the USA.

AI Valuation

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