$_Transcendence

Oil on wood 60cm x 90xm

This piece took nearly a year from first draft to completion.

Paint, despair, rework, repeat.

Inspired by @badspacecomics, paying my due respects to dark scifi and the human condition.

I wasn’t able to tell what exactly struck me at first but during the process some clarity emerged, converging around questions derived from the fact of our restless nature.

Microscopic beings staring into night skies, desperate for god or fate or meaning—anything to soften the knowledge of our own extinction. We navigate by starlight that’s already ancient history. The stars we use to plot our future are messages from an incomprehensible past. This temporal paradox got under my skin the moment I realized it, becoming my own personal lovecraftian horror.

We’ve developed the capacity to imagine not just our own deaths but total extinction, the end of everything. Yet that same awareness drives us outward, transcending boundaries, clutching onto hope even when it means confronting the unthinkable. What are we willing to sacrifice in order to transcend? The planet? Our biology? What does “human” even mean when measured against deep time? Perhaps we’re approaching a schism—those who choose to continue existing as creatures vs those who choose to become machine, each defining life in irreconcilable ways. What happens as we merge further with our technologies, a transformation already underway?

In midst of these ruminations —what does it mean to sit together around fire, shivering bodies warming each other, experiencing singular moments of being, togetherness, nowness, while infinity stretches above us?