Thoughts / by Mirena Rhee

It has been an incredibly intense year where I used the fact that the lockdown closed a lot of the foot traffic and the fact that authorities have been sort of lenient towards illegal installation makers like myself so I worked a lot and I also worked for the Census bureau which was bat s**t crazy. I worked with the ( lack of sense ) Census in Manhattan but I also went on assignment in rural Georgia which was even crazier than asking wealthy Manhattanites about their precise origins and the genealogy of their kids. Just kidding.

Although I love summer only of all the seasons and partially spring because it leads up to Summer I think winter is very beneficial in the sense that allows for a very reflective mood. I really enjoy meditating and reflecting on future projects and past work. I don't think it's very trendy to think about stuff but I do that a lot I contemplate a lot of works in quick succession and hold them in my mind and I do that for long periods of time and I think one of the reasons my projects come to fruition is because I think about them a lot.

Nothing about my work is random although I make a lot of spontaneous decisions - chances are none of it is random none of the numbers are random nor the ideas nor the shapes, everything comes from a solid foundation of previous work, experiences and visceral and tactile, or should I say close proximity to objects or people or being part of a soup of an environment that fosters certain germs of ideas.

I believe we humans have very limited range of choices starting with the fact that we were born kind of randomly into the universe but what is not random about us is that we can create intent, we can create outside of the encoding of our DNA , I don't think Van Gogh painted his cypresses because that's what was in his DNA and he had some urges to do it.

This is what is unique about art, art is this very special extra intent for doing things that are completely unnecessary but necessary for our culture.

Intent is very important even the law considers intent very special, you can get away from something bad if it was a complete accident but you can die if you did something really really bad with a lot of bad intentions.

The same thing is with art -it is our intent that creates the work it's not the medium it's not random acts of thoughts or random acts of flicks of brushes, it's just a convergence of thoughts, of intentions, of experiences maybe some urges mixed in but as a whole

art is an extra intent, the cream on top of the human experience.


And honestly because I'm dictating my thoughts and because we have invented such marvelous things as speech to text - I've missed out on a lot of the commas because this essay is just a stream of thoughts.