My goal this year is to make a post for each new piece I finish and today I finished my first painting of 2021: "Striking a Balance" 24 x 24"
One big take away I got from 2020 was the extent to which polarization has transformed the culture into a disparate landscape of in groups. Sometimes it feels to me that these groups have formed as an escape from critical thinking and public responsibility... Like the members of these groups can only deal with other members of their group and nobody else.
I feel like the retreat into highly polarized groups has made people stop questioning their biases and instead build a reality around their biases, a life that is dominated by a huge blind spot of implicit and explicit biases that drives a wedge through communities.
This painting for me became a meditation about uniting opposing forces and finding a centered perspective. I believe that the way to achieve this is to try to understand why it is that people want to retreat into alternative realities and reject critical thinking.
It's hard to have a definitive answer, but for me it seems like anger and fear over the normal process of change has been exploited and amplified to such an extreme that many choose to shut themselves out of the real world and into echo chambers and confirmation bias.
I believe the way to come together is to become aware of our blindspots and biases, look at the world and each other with new eyes.